* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

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

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Fibble

"For example: my IPv6 router (WAN side) only spits out IPv4 addresses on the LAN side."

That's because it's been configured not to provide IPv6. Go into the control panel and enable it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: turning IPv4 off completely

" BT flogged them a pulse-only phone."

In other countries, telcos were surcharging the ability to USE your touchtone phone.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile

"Such as ?"

It's funny when you start challenging people on that one.

IPv6 addresses most of the problems people bring up (including stable mobile IPs). The bigger problem is catering to every possibility that IPv6 offers and the simple answer is that "You don't have to".

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Lee D

"Here, in Germany, many ISPs have been offering IPv6 for a few years and, for many customers, any new connection is automatically and exclusively IPv6"

You might think it's bad in the UK. Meantime in outer Bumfuckistan, the only thing ISPs are selling is NATed IPv4 addresses (If you want a single IPv4 then paying $100 a month is the norm) and NO IPv6

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meanwhile

"So, we should be waiting for IPX, surely?"

You may be trying to be ironic but you're closer to the mark than you realise.

IPv4 was a short-term kludge designed to cater to increasing network sizes until the REAL Internet Protocol that was being developed by Novell was released - and that REAL Internet Protocol is IPX

Of course IPX turned out to be unroutable, so we were stuck with the IPv4 kludge.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It's time that misleading advertising claims were launched."

Following up on my own post: People should be prodding Ofcom.

Seriously. Phone the wankers up and ask why they're allowing ISPs not offering IPv6 to say they're offering Internet access.

The more people who do that, the more likely it is they'll take action.

Alan Brown Silver badge

IPv4-only can't talk to IPv6 only.

IPv6 only can't talk to IPv4 only.

Dual stacks have been around for 20 years. Deal with it FFS.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IPv6 Support by UK ISP's

"requires them to actually spend loads-a-money on their infrastructure."

Bullshit.

Core equipment used by ISPs has supported IPv6 for a long time. This is being blocked by accountants.

Even the large ISPs which "don't offer IPv6" do offer it to business accounts and it's definitely there in their core networks.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not exactly important

"but it does it in such a cack-handed way"

The original proposal for IPv4 was to use 128 bits for addresses. It was cut down to 32 bits because IPv4 was intended to be a kludge with an expected lifespan of a decade at most.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: what new protocols?

"There is a bunch of fancy shit out there I know that has never had any value to me(e.g. TRILL -- but that is a layer 2 thing totally independent of course of layer 3 IP)."

You haven't been paying attention:

https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/90/slides/slides-90-trill-2.pdf

TRILL keeps being pushed as a data centre protocol, but the reality is that it's better used as a large campus WAN/MAN one - the reason Radia Perlman created it was spanning-tree storms that took out a hospital network, caused by continued joining up of previously-isolated switch networks until the entire ediface fell over horribly.

TRILL distributed L3 gateways take away the SPOF of routers and the extreme traffic loads which can occur on router links. It's better than the Anycast L3 gateway proposal which proceeded it.

Yes, it works on IPv6 as well as IPv4

The vast majority of readers might THINK they have no use for TRILL, but as soon as you have more than a couple of switches interconnected and/or start having to use LACP, it has advantages.

Spanning Tree should never be used for networks more than 4 switches wide - the wastefulness of having redundant links sitting idle is one factor as is the convergence time and the fact that ANY LACP link change (even to clients) will result in a spanning-tree reconvergence event. When I'm running multiple 10GB/s links around it's not sensible to waste their capacity by having one or more sitting idle when another may be maxxed out - this happens with both spanning tree and LACP.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If your kid's 18years old and still half baked, try again...

"and failed to get buy in from the major firewall vendors to get fleshed out IPv6 routing and stateful packet inspection. "

Those "major firewall vendors" didn't exist that long ago and SPI was only just starting to be discussed.

Can I sell you a tardis?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Where I am working right now

" We're talkiing about a 10 billion node public network."

There are only 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses.

Which means that you're using NAT extensively, which in turn means you need to use 8 bytes to canonically refer to anything (PublicIP+PrivateIP) and possibly more if there are multilayer NATs going on.

So why not just use IPv6 and be done with the kludges?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Perhaps there is limited support in the UK, but I can tell you quite clearly that the major ISPs in the US support IPv6"

The same applies across Europe.

The UK is seriously laggardly.

OFCOM promised 4 years ago that when IPv6 hit a threshold they would no longer allow ISPs not selling IPv6 to call their product "Internet access", but they wouldn't specify the threshold then and show no sign of applying it now.

It's time that misleading advertising claims were launched.

Uber drivers entitled to UK minimum wage, London tribunal rules

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Yes, but those are heavy machines operated by a *legally liable* human driver."

The number of kids mown down by those legally liable drivers is uncomfortably high. A robot is paying 100% attention 100% of the time, not looking in the back seat at fighting children, eating cereal at the wheel or screaming abuse at the driver in the next lane for having the temerity to want to merge.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Self driving cars and uber

"Cue kids playing chicken and winning every time. Traffic comes to a standstill."

As with human drivers, robots can and will be programmed to move slowly forward and nudge their way through.

And that's without the factor of the passengers getting out and forcing the issue. They're not helplessly locked inside the vehicle and they're likely to be pissed off.

(In the rural areas where I was a kid it was common practise for someone to get out and walk in front of the car if you were confronted with a mob of 5-10,000 sheep on the road that wouldn't let vehicles though. Sheep that are regularly moved on roads learn to get out of the way of cars so it wasn't always necessary)

Tesco Bank limits online transactions after fraud hits thousands

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Tesco bank headers missing

"I can promise you that none of these missing headers resulted in the funds of 20k customer accounts growing feet and walking away..."

No, but they do point to a lack of care and attention - which is what enabled the events to occur.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Headers check

HSBC also get an F

It'd be interesting to post a list.

Facebook 'fesses up to WhatsApp privacy blunder in UK

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bah - one look at the requested permissions was enough for me

" an article here on El Reg alerted me to the plans to feed phone numbers back to Facebook for some platform integration project, which you could not opt out of. "

Facebook has been ordered not to do this in the UK. They'll ignore the order anyway.

Brit loan firm gets comeuppance for 7.7 million spam texts

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Good

"But why is the fine set so low?"

Because there's no statutory damages, which means that higher fines have resulted in the spammer sucessfully challenging it in court.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Fine should be £1 per spam text."

No, emulate the USA where victims are entitled to $500 statutory damages per call/SMS/fax. (tripled if the target is in the TPS/FPS, etc)

That makes it worthwhile for individuals to file in small claims. Death of 1 million paper cuts (and going bankrupt doesn't protect you from court awards)

Spam King sent down for 30 months

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So the U.S. is learning from the old Soviet Union.

"4 - his customers never get challenged, let alone convicted so the market continues to exist"

Most spam law holds the hirer jointly and severally liable with the spammer. No sane (legitimate) outfit would hire Sanford and that's why most of what he's been pushing is flat out illegal fly-by-night stuff since the year dot.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So the U.S. is learning from the old Soviet Union.

" It has been used for years as way to have child predators locked up long after there sentence is over."

Western countries usually prefer to use "preventative detention" for such cases. It has the same effect without running the risk that some doctor might declare them safe enough to send into the bright wide world.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The mental health evaluation has potential..

"because that could lead to an assessment that he's not competent on his own and has to remain in care."

He's amply demonstarted that he's a recidivist offender. Some people I know who've dealt with him have described him as a pure sociopath with no real concept of consequences.

So with any luck, that assessment will happen.

Add it to the tab: ICO fines another spammer as unpaid bills mount

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cut off the head

"The spammers generate leads which are sold on to companies that actually have some product or service."

This is exactly the model that the insurance scam callers operate on.

The insurance industry has tried to combat it by making commissions on leads illegal but so far that hasn't helped.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"If the call originated from another provider they charge that provider who can then add their own handling charge and bill the caller."

Except that calling data is frequently fraudulent and there is _no_ originating telco to charge.

One way of handling this is to make phone call routing fraud and caller-id falsification a serious criminal offence and then go after the directors for that.

Or simply enact a right of personal action and statutory £500 damages PER CALL - USA TCPA style - with triple damages for wilful violations (such as hitting TPS-registered numbers).

The death of a million paper cuts will take care of the rest.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Go after the lawyers as well...

"To set up any small business, the easiest way is to buy an "off the shelf" company, set up by a lawyer."

1: Most are setup by accountants.

2: Filing the paperwork yourself is trivial but takes a few days to activate and involves standing in an office. Tthe only advantage to an off-the-shelf is that it's available instantly.

3: If you're burning through companmies as fast as these scammers are, there's a good chance they've built up a stock of names already OR haven't even bothered registering the trading names they use.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The ICO is toothless

"Perhaps there is a sideline in the Telco's where they sell newly activated numbers and the details for the contents of brown envelopes?"

It's already been proven to have happened.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

"It is also possible at the switch, but the tel-co's make money by connecting calls and they won't get paid if they block the call"

The vast majority of these calls are being injected with fraudulent routing information (different to forged caller-ID), so they don't get paid at all, or end up in billing disputes with telcos who didn't originate the calls.

This is why some of the mobile companies have started filtering such calls.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

"It'd also help if domestic phone users were enabled to set up whitelists,"

Which will result in addressbook snatching and forged callerID using entries from the addressbook, as has been happening for many years when targetting mobiles.

A few of these spammy directors need to be found face down at their desks with the back of their skull missing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

" but the issue is that the companies are set up as limited companies, which protects the shareholders against such things as fines against the company."

Shareholders: yes

Directors: NO, absolutely not.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

"Maybe it should target the people running the companies instead?"

maybe it should hold the spammer AND THE COMPANY WHICH HIRED THEM jointly and severally liable.

I'm currently getting spam for Greenpeace UK, Debenhams and M&S, amongst others.

Whoosh! China shows off J-20 'stealth' fighters and jet drones

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stealth

There are only so many ways you can build an aircraft, especially if you want to minimise your radar cross section, carry weaponry and be able to dogfight effectively.

Look up "Convergent evolution" sometime.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Spares

You could relaunch the TSR2 program...

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stealth..

F35 is an underpowered tubby wee thing with stubby wings. Even a light bomber should be able to fly rings around it.

That's assuming it ever sees combat. It's the 21st century F-111B and should have suffered the same fate already.

Cloudflare ordered by judge to help unmask two website owners

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Peer Review

>> "Elsevier is just a commercial publisher."

> No, commercial publishers PAY the writers. Elsevier behaves like a Vanity house.

It's worse than that. Elsevier has been taking freely available work and paywalling it without permission, then getting the non-paywalled copies taken down.

That's fullscale piracy. If the shoe fits....

Their activities have had a major chilling effect on scientific publication. Their business model needs to be terminate with extreme predjudice.

NASA's asteroid orbit calculator spots a hot rock zipping past

Alan Brown Silver badge

A planet-steriliser would need to be several hundred kilometers across. We can see those already.

Chicxulub shouldn't have been a planetary extinction event - even with the concurrent deccan traps eruptions- and wouldn't have been if it hadn't hit on a shallow sea full of carbonate rocks.

That was truely a case of "spectacularly bad luck" for the dinosaurs, because without the vulcanism it still wouldn't have been an extinction event.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Five days notice

"Planet-killers are big, and we spot them quite a bit further out."

The vast majority of potential planetkillers we've discovered so far have blindsided us by coming from the direction of the sun and only been seen AFTER they've been past us and are on the way outwards

It's even harder to see a small dark thing in front of (or in the vicinity of) an extremely bright, extremely large thing than it is to see a small dark thing in a large dark space unless it's far enough away to be well lit by the bright thing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Five days notice

"Instead of having one massive rock hit in a vaguely predictable location, we have thousands of radioactive pebbles burn up in the atmosphere and coat the planet."

Realistically the added radioactivity from a "nuke the rock" scenario (which is unlikely to be successful) would be about a 0.01% increase in detectable planetary radioactivity. You'd have to be spectacularly unlucky to die from it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Five days notice

"The USA almost certainly has nuclear weapons in orbit."

Doing so would breach almost every nuclear limitation treaty signed since the Cuban missile crisis.

The USA may be gung-ho, but it's not THAT gung-ho. The political stink if it was discovered would be unrecoverable - and there would be so many people involved that it's impossible to keep it secret for 50 years.

There are certainly nuclear power sources in orbit and even one nuclear reactor (it failed within weeks of orbit and has been up there over 50 years) but space is a demilitarised zone - which is why ASATS are a big deal.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Five days notice

"If Russia and America could launch their arsenal of nuclear missiles within 60 minutes of knowing an attack has been started, I think we could definately nuke an asteroid within 5 days."

A ballistic missile has enough energy to loft a lump of metal high into the air, but not into orbit. You really don't want to be letting off nukes only 600-800 miles above the surface (Think "EMP") with an intercept window measured in fractions of a second.

You need multistage rockets to intercept this kind of lump at a reasonable distance - which take weeks to assemble and get ready for launch - and even with a nuclear MOAB penetrator we still have no idea what would actually happen(*). These things are either pretty loosely held together (in which case the airburst scenarios that Craterhunter(**) has postulated might well sterilise a continent anyway) or solidly welded (in which case the effect would be minimal)

(*) A nuclear burst beside or on the surface of a rock or iceball won't have much/any deflection effect at close ranges so you're relying on breaking it up - and quite frankly without something a multiple of the Tsar Bomb'z size you're unlikely to have much effect(***)

(**) craterhunter.wordpress.com - this is the theory that a string of airbursting comet fragments ~10k years ago sterilised the North American continent and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling.

(***) Whilst the cold war doom scenario was multi-megaton bombs over cities using Castle Bravo as the example, virtually all nuclear weapons since the mid 1960s are smaller yield than Fat Man thanks to improved targetting meaning they simply don't need to be large to destroy their targets and those multi-megaton weapons simply don't exist anymore - which means months of work to build one. Even the modern stockpile of H-bombs are only 50-150kt dialable yield whilst "neutron bombs" (H-bombs with a Tungsten case instead of U238) are under 5kt. Most "conventional" nukes are in the 5-15kt dialable yield range and nuclear depth charges are around 0.3-0.5kt. These are enough to give the biosphere (and planet-side target) a "really bad day" but nowhere near enough to do much damage to a multi-billion ton rockpile.

MPs want Blighty to enforce domestic roaming to fix 'not spots'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: First Step. Just stop operators charging consumers for 2G.

"The only way networks will be improved if it hits actual network operators in the pocket, not their customers."

ITYM in the shareholders' and directors' pockets.

The problem at the moment is that fines are simply factored in as a cost of doing business.

Fines should be targetted against the people responsible for these decisions and levied against the operating profits/dividends.

The problem at the moment is that the UK mobile legal structure as laid down by Ofcom prohibits networks from pooling resources, which results in substantial unnecessary overbuilding.

The simple solution for NIMBYism on towers (more frequently - poles) is to make it very clear that those objecting are shooting themselves in the foot for coverage. Responding to every signatory on those petitions about shitty coverage with "We attempted to put up a tower in order to fix this and objections from this list of people killed it" will make the issue self-limiting.

Yes, the mobile companies have power of planning appeal but the more recent planning rules which were supposed to free things up have actually had the opposite effect in many areas and made it MUCH harder/far more expensive to appeal, with no guarantee of being awarded court costs, let alone the entire bill for taking it to court.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Up yours, Mobile UK

"you don't need four separate* base stations to serve some small village with five houses and a shop miles from a main road. "

A large chunk of the problem is that unlike other countries in europe, UK operators are NOT allowed to pool resources in low population density areas and build a single tower + radioset that will handle all networks.

They're frequently not even allowed to co-locate their kit on the same tower.

Uber's robo-truck makes first delivery of ... Budweiser in Colorado

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Just development

"Uber will hire human drivers to do the difficult driving, refuelling and loading, "

Haulage truck pulls into the yard, by the pumps. Monkey fills it up, checks the tyres, navigates it around the yard and docks it, then gets into another truck and returns to pump court and exits, waiting for for next truck.

Haulage truck drives off to destination, sans monkey.

Monkeys are happy - they can sleep in their own bed each night.

Bosses are happy. They can pay monkeys less than drivers, 8 hours are a time (3 shifts) for less than drivers and no restrictions on operating hours thanks to robots doing the longhaul stuff.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is the future

> Pilots have a long history of considering themselves special (lots of training, prestige job, high salaries)

Pilots have a long history of getting themselves into mind-stupifying levels of debt and working insane hours to qualify for those jobs. The reason they demand the salaries is to pay it all off.

Remember that when you complain about the rates your UK university-educated (and debt-laden) graduates are demanding for XYZ job.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is the beginning...

"There are already large trucking depots on some state borders for assembling and breaking up triple hitch hauls, and there are yards outside cities for shifting trailers and loads before heading into town. "

You can and should expect such yards to become the norm everywhere. This model has been under development for several decades and robot drivers is a natural fit. Most of the big rig makers have been proposing "freeway-only" designs to service marshalling yards for a long time.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"And for any proper delivery vehicle, like for instance a supermarket truck, it's the driver who unloads the cages at each drop off. "

You're confusing "haulage" with "drayage"

You can bet that haulage will see drivers replaced long before drayage does. Haulage drivers don't load or unload their cargo either.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: They'll make everyone unemployed

Minicabs and black cabs will be the second great casualty of robot drivers.

Robots are cheaper than humans, don't get tired, don't need shift breaks and don't rabbit on inanely about immigrants.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: They'll make everyone unemployed

The estimate in 2012 was that robot drivers will make at least 400 million people redundant worldwide and big rigs are where it'll be felt most keenly.

Whilst simultaneously reducing the road toll by at least 90% - virtually all crashes are caused by human error.

The moment robot drivers are "good enough" (they don't need to be perfect, just better than humans for most tasks and that's not hard), you'll see insurance premiums for having a monkey behind the wheel skyrocket.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If it can't cope with things like pedestrians and roadkill

"But in those circumstances a human's pretty safe too."

No. Humans get bored shitless of driving at the same speed or staying behind the same truck for 100 miles and do things like 4mile-long overtakes or driving off the road when there's a bend, or running at non-fuel-consumption-optimal speeds (ie, with the loud pedal mashed to the floor and the limiter controlling the road speed)

Autonomous driving makes more sense in a big rig first, at least partly because there's a lot more space to fit sensors and CPUs and partly because (as with aircraft) saving a bit on fuel makes a big difference to fleet operational costs.

F-35 'sovereign data gateway' will stop US reading pilots' personal data? Yeah right

Alan Brown Silver badge

"rather it’s to sustain the Western military industrial complex for as long as possible."

Which may not be very long at all once non-USA governements realise how much it costs to fly and how susceptable the tubby wee thing is to older radar coming at it from behind.