* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Oracle already wins 'crypto bug of the year' with Java digital signature bypass

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Thank you, Jesus . . .

Unfortunately this shit is so embedded in every aspect of daily life that "You've got to deal with it whether you like it or not, grandad"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Contract computer coding methodology - especially when outsourced to Bangalore - "why write 5 lines when 12 pages will do?"

It's easier to obscure bugs and keeps you in long-term employment

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Oracle "those number things are hard"

We'll just turn those ones all the way up to 11

Don't let ransomware crooks spend months in your network – like this govt agency did

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This reads like...

This, in spades

It is (of course) one of the most commonly DEMANDED things by PHBs

Google: Russian credential thieves target NATO, Eastern European military

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: So, we know who they are

" It may look like an "IP address" to anyone but inside each IP addresses is a VMware instance and blocking that IP address blocks all other legitimate traffic."

And?

The outfits hosting such IPs usually ignore any/all complaints/actions short of that and even beyond it until it actually starts affecting their income - we saw that 20 years ago in the Spam Wars and nothing's changed since then

SpaceX's Starlink service lands first aviation customer

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Put that laptop away

The specific interference issue around mobiles which caused the ban was airborne units jamming ground stations over a wide area. Nothing to do with in-aircraft systems at all

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Such memories...

and sending a photocopy of the disk when asked to send a copy

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Closest I've seen...

ahh, cleaners.....

I had a linux PC used as a router in a museum. It died 3 days short of 3 years uptime. Guess why?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Closest I've seen...

I had a customer who demanded a callout because her mail wasn't working - not once but on 3 separate occasions - an hour's drive away...

...each time because her husband had minimised the clent

Europe twists YouTube's arm to get better cookie consent popups

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is how I browse a webpage these days

noscript helps a lot with the annoying javascript autoplay shit

third party javascript needs to die even more urgently than the bloody cookies

IBM ordered to pay $105 million to insurer over tech project's collapse

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Whoa, whoa, whoa ....

Wasted expenditure IS actual losses

Infosys quits Russia, ending UK political and tax scandal … maybe

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Infosys has also donated $1 million towards Ukrainian relief efforts

McDs and related outfits are FRANCHISES

It gets even more tricky because corporate can leave and withdraw licensing for the signage/processes/supplies/marketing but they can't force franchisees to close up (ie: they could change names to HackBoeing, secure alternative supplies and carry on)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Infosys may be Indian and India may be backing Russia, but it's clear the Indian _PEOPLE_ don't feel that way

Indian oil importers grabbed a shitload of cheap Russian oil - only to find they can't offload it to anyone - nobody wants to buy it

This is what happens when money-focussed mercantilists meet consumers with ethics

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @wolfetone

"Apparently nobody died"

The stats on previous ships after ammunition stores exploded lead me to suspect rather differently.

It tends to be terminal for nearly everyone below decks even before the vessel sinks

Turkish coast guard responding to the SOS only pulled 58 russian sailors out of the water and at that point the ship was on its side

An awful lot of young men are dying to massage an old man's ego - young men that Russia cannot afford to lose when you look at its demographics profile. The population age curve is already upside down and it's the fastest falling population on the planet

After this mess is over (assuming we don't go full WW3), Russia is going to be a complete basket case for decades - and it needs to be emphasised that the circumstances which put Putin in charge were the direct result of Western right wingers NOT liking Russia's tenative move towards social democracy, therefore backing the coup back in 1993

Alan Brown Silver badge

Elizabeth 2 is WHY so many Commonwealth countries have retained a constiutional monarchy

Charles is probably why most of them will ditch it for a constitutional republic of some flavour

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Evasion

and there's a whole industry structured around maximum tax avoidance whilst ensuring it's not tax evasion

Alan Brown Silver badge

" requires holders to pay US taxes on all income earned globally (minus any paid locally)"

And the $64million question: Did they?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Rwanda next

Guess where infosys also has tentacles and is involved in the lastest Tory wheeze?

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Never get the chance to do it again

one problem is that low serial numbers are always buggy as hell... not confidence inspiring for nuke design work

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Formatting pc's in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1

Those were the days.... AMD K5/K6 cpus ran 50% faster than Intel for integer ops, so if you wanted to run non-GUI stuff (linux servers), that was what you purchased

Cyrix were ok but rather....toasty (not as toasty as 80286s - who else got serious fingertip burns off one?)

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not safe, don't forget the rest of the universe...

krikkit!

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

If sufficiently irradiated they may become intelligent, angry and armed

Beware of the coming of the great cow guru

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Starlink has designed their satellite coverage based on assumptions about which locations and to how many people they'll be able to sell their service"

Those assumptions didn't include much coverage in Europe because terrestrial coverage is good and there's decent local competition

The USA is an entirely different market which is only possible because of massive local manipulation and monpolisation - you can see how the telcos have been trying (and failing) to get Starlink shut out of their cozy income streams. What is likely to actually happen is that they'll suddenly find that all the "too hard" places to provide service to suddenly became possible after all - at a reasonable price - but customers won't care after 20+ years of being shafted

Africa is a massive market which hasn't even been touched yet (dozens of countries), as is most of Asia. If you look at starlink.sx you'll see that South America has grabbed it with both hands as most of the countries there are taking advantage of an opportunity to connect citizens in ways previously unattainable

Alan Brown Silver badge

If you take a closer look you'll notice that Starlink is now capable of providing service to large chunks of the atlantic and pacific oceans. With V2's laser linking it gets even easier

marineised dishes aren't a thing (yet) but they'll happen. As will aviation-specialised ones

The income stream is there, and not where you assume it's coming from.

Apart from the massive potential for Ships at Sea and Aircraft in Flight (both currently playing eye-watering fees to Inmarsat, etc) there's the wee issue that they can provide intercontinental linking of financial centres (particularly asia-EU/asia-USA) at lower latencies than any terrestrial cable) and the income from THAT could pay the entire constellation all by itself once it comes onstream

I've been asked to provide a report on the feasibility of using Starlink for providing linking to hundreds of remote villages in a very deprived country and at first glance I can't see any particular obstacle. Until I suggested it the proponents were looking at commitments of billions of dollars for worse bandwidth and being beholden to the possibility of authoritarian local governments cutting off connectivity

Terrestrial IS cheaper where the population density supports it but there are large chunks of the planet where you simply can't put infrastructure (water, mountains) or there aren't enough people to justify it.

I spent a good part of the 1980s-90s on the end of a geostationary satellite link and know how frustrating that is. LEO birds are a godsend. I get that the French are doing this for various "because we're french" reasons but they're probably going about it the wrong way

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I blame the attrocious SF we have today

It's neither unless there's a delta in there, otherwise the energy is just potential

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: re: Beware of the Leopard

The US Feds are currently mulling walking away from the whole mess. The war on drugs was lost a long time ago and the only ones benefitting from its current form are the dealers

(It's a Forever war because you're attacking a symptom (usage), not the cause (WHY people are falling into addiction). A "war on sneezing" would be just as effective if you wanted to eliminate the common cold)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: We live in a world where con artists rule the day.

"The Earth had CO2 levels as high as 700-900 ppm and life on this planet flourished"

last time the planet went past ~850ppm, Very Bad Things Happened in a short period of time.

Look up the Permian Extinction event. Once it hit that kneepoint it was all over in less than a decade

World: not destroyed

Oxygen levels: substantially reduced and stayed that way for a long time

Extinction level: Extreme (93-95% by biomass or species count)

Flourishing life: Red Tides on Steroids (Ironically, producing much of the oil we're now burning), not much else on land or sea

Humans can't survive long-term in an atmospheric oxygen sea-level equivalent much less than 17% and it's a particularly nasty way to die (altitude sickness - you essentially drown in your own lungs)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: RF

I've had this discussion with a couple of UK loonies. They see a dish on the horizon and think 5G, etc etc.

Explaining inverse square laws, how the phone in their pocket is giving them millions of times higher doses and how that's nothing compared to laying on an electric blanket is amusing

Kinda like the recent shenanigans at Chernobyl. Soldiers shouldn't have been digging in the Red Forest but readings 50 times higher than normal aren't anything to write home about (they're normal in some parts of the world). Sure you don't want to live there for an extended period (years) but even a few months is fine and I speculated that soldiers had been either doing something extremely stupid or up to no good (or both), such as selfies at the Elephant's Foot or attempting to steal items they shouldn't be going anywhere near with someone else's 10-foot bargepole.

Sure enough, it came out that dolts were doing things like handling Cobalt-60 sources without protection and attempting to steal various radiologically red hot items

Back on the antenna front: One of the fun things back in my telco days was to put up antennas and wait for the objections to roll in - only then would we attempt to connect them to equipment, having "calibrated the local loony brigade".

In a few cases we put up painted wooden/plastic replicas at one location whilst having disguised ones elsewhere. In no instances whatsoever were there evere complaints about the non-visible ones, but the wooden ones upset a lot of chakras

Alan Brown Silver badge

Familiar story...

"France's biggest telecoms operator, Orange, inked a deal [PDF] with Eutelsat in 2020 under which it bought out all available capacity on Eutelsat's Konnect satellite to cover the entire French territory"

Back in the late 1990s, Telecom New Zealand did the same thing with all satelite and cable bandwidth into the country to prevent anyone else buying it - doing so allowed them to keep prices up. The cost of the unsused bandwidth was significantly lower than the profit hit they'd have taken by having to pricematch incoming competition

In other countries (Cook Islands, Fiji, Tonga, Philippines) the incumbents simply got the government to declare they were the only company allowed to offer international services - sometimes by the simple expedient of requiring a license to operate, which they would simply never ever issue

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why?

" For a cascade the best bet is a mummy-bear orbit like OneWeb."

Quality British clusterfucks

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

The villagers with horns are witches and must be weighed to see if they are lighter than a duck

Alan Brown Silver badge

People believed that in India - where there is no 5G

Google Play pulls sneaky data-harvesting apps with 46m+ downloads

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hidden Functionality

This one is a case for the ICO

Why OpenAI recruited human contractors to improve GPT-3

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A shot in the dark

A human needs to be taught what pornography is in the first place too. The thing is that after a while it can infer all by itself whilst the poor AI is still guessing

Finnish govt websites knocked down as Ukraine President addresses MPs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Defense pact

The US was about to invade Japan (with the allies) and stood to lose around 1 million soldiers in the process. They're STILL (in 2022) handing out purple hearts minted in anticipation of that 1945 land invasion

Japanese civilian casualties were projected to be around 10 million

Meantime another 25 million people would have died in China - a US ally at the time - as the IJA continued its scorched earth retreat policy for at least another 6 months

The Japanese leadership weren't even particularly impresssed with Hiroshima. Compared with the one million dead in the Tokyo firestorm it wasn't even a drop in the bucket. What got their attention was that it was achieved with ONE bomb and they only realised that 3 days after the event

Hindsight is 20/20 but even Japanese will tell you that the 2 nuclear weapons saved more lives than they killed

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Putin is accomplishing all of his goals

It's unlikely. The country is too big and too fragmented to govern

What we call "Russia" is something like 87 "autonomous republics" and it's more likely that many of those will announce full independence

It's lkely that by June 90% of the aviation fleet will be grounded (only 5% are 100% russian-built and getting spares/support for the rest is essentially impossible) with large chucks of the sector already idled. The significance of that is the lack of year-round passable roads across large chunks of the Russian hinterland

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Amazing

And it's the "forced to pick" part which matters here

Finns have historically preferred not to, they're making that choice NOW because they now have to. Neither NATO or Sweden is threatening to invade

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

minus 49, shirley?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

That kind of setup relies on earth (and rocks) being a pretty good insulator, so you can deposit and withdraw heat as needed year-round

Geothermal benefits and suffers from the same issue. They always start out well but once you draw off heat they invariably suffer from very slow replenishment issues unless sitting on top of a mantle plume or magma chamber (and even then it's iffy)

Alan Brown Silver badge

There are plenty of things that work in the lab but fail to scale. Wasn't this first tried about 50 years ago?

Alan Brown Silver badge

You can, but heat harvesting is more efficient

Alan Brown Silver badge

That kind of fission design was produced in the 1960s (98-99% output waste reduction, and hot enough to produce supercritical steam, which virtually no current fission reactor design can do)

It also reduces input waste by 89% (that's how much is wasted when you enrich uranium to "reactor grade") and can act as a nuclear garbage disposal for existing nuclear waste including that wasted "depleted uranium" (which is important because depleted uranium is actually your base material for nuclear weapons production, not the enriched stuff)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Fission reactors as we know them are built around the waste products of weapons-making because the original power reactor was and IT was built that way "because that's what was available"

There are better designs. Alvin Weinberg proved that in the 1960s and promptly got drummed out of the US nuclear industry (ironicaly he built the original fission reactor as we know it and built the better one because he didn't like the way his prototype was being scaled up to dangerous sizes). Several countries are working on that and China's 2MW test unit went critical last September. We should be seeing announcements on progress towards their 100MW electrical test unit soon

'Virtually no difference' between AI and humans in diagnosing prediabetes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: From a diabetic

About the only use for this is if the AI was to routinely scan data from CT scans given for other reasons and flag anything odd for further attention

The radiation load of a CT scan is huge and chucking a patient under one just for this purpose is silly

UK suit over reselling surplus Microsoft licenses rolls on

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Licence, not license

OED allows both. This battle is long-lost

Any fool can write a language: It takes compilers to save the world

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Does really a single application promote innovation?

"if everything is compiled by GCC, where's the innovation?"

In a commercial environment it's driven by competition and the risk is monopolism (embrace, extend extinguish)

In a GNU environment it's driven by the commons itself. If something's better it WILL be folded into the mainstream, Sucessful forks flourish and become the mainstream, Unsucessful ones have the useful parts incorporated into mainstream anyway

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: C of the '80s

As an aside, IIRC the original Atari ST roms were coded/compiled using Lattice C

in the early 2000s someone recompiled them using a more modern compiler (I don't know how much source mangling was required), resulting in them occupying less than half the ROM space as well as running significantly faster

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Any fool can write a language"

Trust me, it's easier to debug C written by a COBOL prgrammer than the inverse....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I miss a critical note and some figures.

Speaking from experience with the commercial rivals for GCC/LLVM, they aren't much better and come with an added dash of long-term abandonment

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: KISS 2: Generic Code

This is exactly the problem with m4, you dare not use all its "features" - doing so is very likely to unleash an eldritch horror

But what do I know? I always handcoded my sendmail.cf, because I could and m4 usually didn't do what I wanted