* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Geomagnetic storm takes out 40 of 49 brand new Starlink satellites

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Star Trek Voyager

The problematic junk isn't low enough to be affected much by atmospheric expansion, or it would be taken down already

As is being _repeatedly_ pointed out, Starlink put their birds into exceptionally low initial orbits, specifically so any DOA units won't cause clutter. That's absolutely critical when you're launching so many of the things

The issue we're seeing does bring up the point that "Laser Brooms" can be used to help deorbit small junk though. The problem is that anyone who deploys the tech to do this can also deorbot equipment belonging to countries they're not friendly witrh

Cleaning up orbiting debris is less technically fraugt than politically - what's needed is for a joint body to oversee a cleanup effort but there aren't enough adults in the room (and the biggest messy kid with a temper is also the one with the biggest mouth and most weapons)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No loss

And THAT is exactly the gap that Starlink is designed to fill

Swipe left: Snoops use dating apps to hook sources, says Australian Five Eyes boss

Alan Brown Silver badge

Bear in mind this is the same agency which started the current American smear campaign aginast Huawei with no basis and a few maybes

Also bear in mind that these tactics are just as easily pulled by "friendly" countries.

Let's not forget that the CIA/MI6 orchestrated what was essentially a coup against the Gough-Whutlam Australian government in 1974 and Australian politics has been broken ever since

Photon fantastic: James Webb Space Telescope spies its first starlight

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Do your bit for ElReg

If you're paying a flat rate, there is another way of gaming the ad systems' model:

Sending something out which clicks on EVERYTHING

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fake...

"All the world is faked except thee and me - and frankly I have doubts about thee"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Will this alignment have to be repeated in the future?

Indeed

Murphy's law ACTUALLY states "If an aircraft part can be installed 2 ways around and one way is the wrong way, you can guarantee someone will do it"

The surprising part is that even when parts have been explicitly designed NOT to be installed 2 ways around, people have still managed to do it on spacecraft costing billions of dollars

Harvard's law states that "Under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions the device will do what it damned well pleases"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

"The dawgs stayed home for that one"

If they hadn't, they'd probably have tried to climb into the sleeping bags too

Joint European Torus more than doubles fusion record with 59 megajoules

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: More megajoules

But very energetic in a short period of time

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: use of fusion

Renewables can slightly outproduce existing carbon-sourced electrical generation.

Electrical generation only accounts for 1/3 of carbon emissions in developed countries

Getting rid of the OTHER carbon emissions requires a lot more electrical production requirement that renewables can't be extended to fill

No, paving deserts with solar cells or windmills is not a viable solution - and for the UK, nor is relying on European generation. There are hard practical limits on transmission distances and underwater transmission power maximums

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: use of fusion

So far every prediction which has been achieved has been close to the "worst case scenario" which politicians of 40 years ago refused to consider as a possiblity

This doesn't bode well for the future - and there are methane clathrate deposits bubbling out of the siberian continental shelf - whilst politicians are deflecting and saying this doesn't add much to what's being emitted, the REAL danger is that it's destabilising the 20Gigatonnes that's still down there, making it more likely to come out in one big "Storegga" event. All it takes is a reasonable earthquake to kick things off

Even that's survivable. The problem is that it cause a chain reaction and drive atmospheric CO2 levels past 800ppm. Once that happens it's "Game over, complex life" and we have another permian-level extinction on our hands

Alan Brown Silver badge

"it needs to be much, much bigger"

Star sized, perhaps

US carriers want to junk three times more Chinese comms kit than planned

Alan Brown Silver badge

Telco equipment replacement cycles are frequently measured in decades, not the 3-5 year cycles of enterprise

Anything less than 10 years old is unlikely to be scheduled (or overdue) for replacement

US telcos are facing another issue anyway at the moment - Starlink - and this time state PUCs can't legislate legal local monopoly for them to get rid of the competition

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Good on her!

"Just another example of the US using the wrong tactics for their strategy"

It's protectionism/tradewars without actually admitting it - just like the chicken tax 25% import duty on light trucks/vans is stll in place 60 years after the issue that triggered it (food poisoning cases in West Germany traceable to imported US chicken and the appalling hygiene practices of the farms/abbatoirs - this is WHY there's a EU ban on "chlorinated chicken" (the ban is on the farming/slaughter practices, not the chlorine wash) - The USA preferred to engage in a trade war rather than encourage farmers to clean up a major health issue that remains entrenched to this day)

It's hardly a new thing though.

Britain invoked "yellow peril" sentiments in 1969 when strongarming New Zealand's government to overturn the contracts the NZ Post Office had signed with NEC and Fujistsu to replace aging Strowger switches and longhaul communications gear in favour of STC equipment.

In the end it ended up costing 3-5 times as much for the British equipment (installed and running) - as the turnkey Japanese contracts. To add insult to injury the British equipment was vastly inferior in spec and reliability to the Japanese stuff which had been trialled, ending up being ripped out in favour of NEAX switches in the 1980s whilst the NEC and Fujitsu equipment it was meant to compete with kept going and barely missed a beat until the day it was turned off

In aviation, we see it with tbe aggressiveness of Boeing sales and the way that F35s have been bulldozed into "friendly" militaries worldwide - the ultimate trojan horse, given that startup codes for these jets are only issued upon request by the State Department and are only valid for a few hours. I'm betting that gets used as leverage in trade (and other) "negotations" at some future point in time.

Arm rages against the insecure chip machine with new Morello architecture

Alan Brown Silver badge

The problem is that mediocre writers will use the hardware as a crutch instead of as a fire extingusher

Defense in depth. Securing software after it's written is a fool's errand and relying on externals to secure the system is an exercise in futility - there is ALWAYS a hole and the issue is ensuring the various holes don't all line up

For those worried about Microsoft's Pluton TPM chip: Lenovo won't even switch it on by default in latest ThinkPads

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If Blackadder were on the IT Crowd...

It's been done:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forklift_Driver_Klaus_%E2%80%93_The_First_Day_on_the_Job

It's very funny and very messy

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=525452031608114 - apologies for the FB link bit it's the only online copy I know of

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Alan Brown Silver badge

This is a case for....

MOLLYGUARD!

From the studio that brought you 'Mortal Wombat' comes 'Pernicious Possum'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Throw it on the barby

Most possums in NZ have bovine tuberculosis - decidedly NOT ok unless very well cooked and as human vaccinations don't cover it you need to be very careful about blood contact whilst preparing the meat

US Army journal's top paper from 2021 says Taiwan should destroy TSMC if China invades

Alan Brown Silver badge

The easiest and fastest way of removing the most problematic airbases from East Asia would be to reunify the Koreas.

The Chinese government doesn't LIKE the Kims, it's essentially stuck with them thanks to McArthur (North Korea was a Soviet creation and continues to be a primarily Russian-supported entity)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Unlikely

China has a _very_ long history (3000+ years) of rogue provinces splitting away and then eventually being assimilated back into the whole

In virtually every case if there's been a war it was started by the secessionist group. Most times the unification was achieved through dynastic alliances (marriages)

The USA thinks that China will invade Taiwan when in reality they're content to have an annual ritual shaking of fists over the Formosa Strait. Chinese leadership tends to think in terms of multiple DECADES, not single election cycles

Bear in mind that if China did militarily invade, the estimates are a couple of million dead on each side. The PRC leadership are not stupid and they know they wouldn't survive that kind of loss, regardless of the percentage in population terms. It's impossible to censor those kinds of numbers and despite the propaganda the country simply isn't that militaristic (They'd much rather trade than fight. It's the USA which is trying to kick things off and that's mostly economic fear of China, not military)

Out of beta and ready for data: 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is here

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: For those addicted to KDE ...

Some of us like the LXDE experience (lubuntu)

It runs pretty well in low spec environments

The robots are coming! 12 million jobs lost to automation in Europe by 2040 – analyst

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Full Employment" has been a myth since the mid-late 19th century. Marx observed this happening

Automation was the root cause of getting rid of child labour and sweatshops, then improving worker conditions (40 hour weeks, etc)

Subsequent methods of covering up lack of full employment have been exclusion of various groups from the workforce (married women, ethnic groups, etc)

Large sections persist in blaming the unemployed for being unemployed when the reality is that there aren't enough "jobs" (real jobs, not bullshit jobs) to go around. This is a direct product of the pervasive puritan religious mindset of "the Devil makes work for idle hands"

It's better to accept that definitions of "working" and "job" need some fundamental changes - along with a bunch of other attitudes.

Attempting to resist automation by banning or obstructing it simply results in the entire industry concerned getting killed off by businesses which embrace it - see British ship building, US Steelmaking, etc etc (British industry to a large extent too, by failing to invest in upkeep and modernisation of plant, etc)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The last round of manufactoring automation was mostly about jobs doing repetitive, easy to describe programmatically, things."

On the other hand, white collar jobs have been automated out of existence at a prodigious rate for a long time and it's not slowing down

When was the last time you saw a room full of ledger clerks making entries?

White collar repetitive jobs are even easier to automate than manufacturing ones, but the ones that people don't object to losing are the "dirty, dangerous or flat our mind-numbing" ones - hence why nobody made much of a fuss when robot welders, stampers and painters appeared on car lines

Automation of "office work" has tended to not see much complaint as it's tended to be women and low end staff replaced. Now that computers can do a lot of "manglement" level repetitve stuff things are changing but for the most part "sinking lid" tends to be the order of the day - more works gets taken on by existing people and as senior staff retire they're simply not replaced

That kind of gradual change is harder to do on a production line, which is why factories tend to simply shut down and end up rebuilt completely somewhere else. It's easier to pick up and train an entirely new (smaller) workforce than have to deal with the resentment and disruption of culling 50-80% of existing staff (usually the "valuable" ones will be headhunted to the new location)

And of course there's the old political saw of "bringing jobs back" - it isn't going to happen. If that factory in Sonora was forced to move back into the USA, it would become a plant in Kentucky employing 400 people (including the gardeners) - beware of politicians who use this as a campaigning pledge because they're simply promising the impossible (nobody is going to DECREASE automation, because humans are the most expensive part of the equation. You only use them for jobs that machines can't do)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: There'll be new jobs that haven't even been though of.

Should...

Toffler made that point back inthe 60s (Future Shock)

What's actually happened is the rise of the Bullshit Job

Alan Brown Silver badge

In the case of the car industry, 12,000 workers in a factory in Detroit became 1500 higher paid ones in a factory in Sonora, turning out better quality product at a higher production cadence

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: baffling failure, IPv6 ...

" it took them, what, 30 years " IPv4 was encapsulated from the outset

The problem is and was that the only overall solution is dual-stacking. It's not as if we hadn't done THAT multiple times before and it wasn't difficult

I had worse times dealing with $LARGE_ORGANISATIONS which had decided that they were never going to connect to the Internet, so pulled IP ranges out of their arses, then had to renumber their entire networks a couple of decades later

One lot who didn't - but tried to NAT themselves instead - phoned me up in a panic one day thinking they'd been hacked by UCLA - who happened to use the same 128.* IP range the organisation had taken for internal use. They resisted renumbering for more than a decade and came up with a lot of creative excuses for why they couldn't provide live Internet access to staff.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's just another thing

"I agree with the article author in that there's little that jumps out as a compelling reason to make the move "

IPv4 NAT breaks a bunch of things in minor ways. Mostly you won't notice it if you're behind a NAT gateway

IPv4 NAT behind IPv4 NAT breaks a LOT of things in MAJOR ways and is a pain int he arse

CGNAT breaks even MORE things in even MORE major ways

Entire countries are setup like this, particularly in Southeast Asia.

At one point all of Vietnam was behind one /24. Myanmar has 60 million people behind a /19

Just because "It works for you" doesn't mean that IPv4 and the kludges that go with it to kweep it running aren't a clusterfuck on steroids. It just means you don't see the shitshow and endless platespinning that's going on behind the scenes to keep everything running

IPv6 really _is_ easier

Alan Brown Silver badge

Bogus claim in second paragraph

IPv4 was NOT built to be future proof

it was a hacky kludge to get past a shortage of IP space whilst the better protocoi was being developed (IPv5 - which was stillborn)

It was only intended to be in use for 5 years, 10 at absolute most

Alan Brown Silver badge

fundamental misunderstandings of IPv4 and v6

IPv4 is a routing protocol. It was intended to be sparse

IPv6 is a routing protocol, it is intended to be sparse

Just because IPv4 allowed 4 billion possible addresses doesn't mean it was INTENDED to have them. It was a red/black tree thing

We have had to layer hideous layers of complexity onto the Internet in order to eke out the usability of every bit of IPv4 numbering that was never intended to be used

The protocol itself was only intended to be in play for about 5 years. It was a self-described "hacky kludge" to keep things going

Packing 1 billion devices into IP v4 space (let alone the current 8-12 billion) was a classic illustraion of the phrase "Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD"

US President Joe Biden reminds the White House he is serious about repairability

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Do The Right Thing

He's pretty hawkish nonetheless. The Mega raids were signed off by Biden when he was VP

Let's not forget:

In the overall scheme of things:

The Democrats are right wing

The Republicans are extreme right wing

MAGA are lunatics

Bernie is a centre right social democrat

Our North American readers have a distorted view of the world because the ENTIRE political spectrum in the USA is significantly right of centre

Russia's naval exercise near Ireland unlikely to involve cable-tapping shenanigans

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "It is considered deeply unfashionable to talk about Western cable tapping"

There are no good guys. There are just bad guys on both sides who believe they are the good guys

The USN Jimmy Carter is in service and active

Second Trojan asteroid confirmed to be leading our planet around the Sun

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: BBQ

insufficient core pressures

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: BBQ

"if you scrub the coal stacks, probably not. "

Even if you scrub the stacks.

Once atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 800ppm, Very Bad Things happen in fairly non-reversible manners in a positive feedback loop which takes a very long time to recover from (tens of thousands of years)

That's what characterised the very rapid set of events at the end of the Permian era (the knee point of the extinction event) - which played out in less than a decade - by which point 90++% (species count and biomass) of plant and animal life on the planet (terrestrial and marine) was dead

There IS a "planetary complex life reset button" (without invoking asteroids or volcanism) and we've been inadvertently leaning on its cover for a while. The only question is what the yield force is....

China orders web operators to spring clean its entire internet

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why repeat ?

Knockoffs and IP theft is something they learned from the USA and UK - pretty much every industrialising society passes through this stage

In a first, FTC extracts millions of dollars from online store accused of blocking bad reviews on its website

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It seems that the FTC should have insisted in one more thing in the settlement: an admission that they were, in fact, wrong."

'No admission of wrongdoing' is quite different from 'flat out denial' and FN's outburst may well bring the FTC back to the table for another bite (triple the settlement if history is any guide)

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

Alan Brown Silver badge

Even with GPL, companies frequently steal code and sell it as their own. The only difference is that you can use copyright law against them if they do

Alan Brown Silver badge

MBA seagulls

The problem is simple

MBAs ask "how much do we need to pay for this?" and when told "nothing, but if we don't there won't be further development", they shut down after the first word and refuse to pay anything

That's the primary reason why OSS devs don't get paid. Even if there's a payment system in place it's rare to get any offers until AFTER a critical piece of software development is shut down and a company is desperate

It's not just businesses either. Even in University positions when I asked for budget to throw at XYZ project - critical to our infrastyructure - to ensure it kept being worked on I'd usually be shut down

Inevitably the developers would close the source and move to $expensive support models, leading to manglement griping about costs, but not listening when informed they had an opportunity to keep costs down by doing the right thing in the first place. This has just happened with one of the better asset management platforms (GLPI)

About the only way OSS gets done reasonably well is when it's funded for a purpose by an institution and the results given away but once they lose interest in it, it becomes abandonware just like anything else (only with source available)

Tesla to disable 'self-driving' feature that allowed vehicles to roll past stop signs at junctions

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: California roll

The USA is the only country in the world where I've encountered 4-way stops

Everywhere else with stops has them on side roads encountering main roads

Alan Brown Silver badge

"the computer cannot necessarily understand what that object is, why it is there, or what it is doing. It certainly cannot accurately infer what the object is about to do next."

I've seen a LOT of humans in charge of large chunks of moving metal who have similar issues (or take the point of view that they are more important than everything else around them)

One of the more important things about self-driving vehicles is that it sets a minimum skill level which humans should be able to attain before being issued with a license

My opinion for several years has been that as soon as computers are shown to be better/safer than humans, insurance actuaries will start forcing the issue by way of premiums - and if government-issued licenses are low quality they're likely to start insisting on higher level testing to qualify for lower premiums when manually controlling the vehicle

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I know how much can go wrong."

What worries ME is that it's still less than can (and regularly DOES) go wrong with wetware at the controls

Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, just statistically better than humans at the job - and that's a pretty low bar to reach

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

This is why I really HATE being told that I must test the system I just spent 12 months developing and building. It's a recipe for disaster upon deployment.

It NEEDS someone else to proofread the docs and drive the interfaces

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

The problem isn't the bad engineers. It's the MBAs and accountants with NO engineering or QA training at all

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

"In my experience, far too many developers only think about the "golden path" through the software, where everything goes exactly as expected."

Case in point in the old days: giving "restricted accounts" which only let people do email.

Do you know how many ways there were to break out of Pine (or most other "email programs") into a shell?

I set up a reward system. Any user who could send me a message after breaking out of the mail system got $10. I thought I'd nailed it down before letting people loose on it but ended up shelling out a few hundred dollars anyway (some didn't bother with the message, but enough did that the holes were picked up quickly)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

I used to get told off for writing this kind of checking by default at high school as "unnecessary" - until it turned out it wasn't

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

This happens a lot in aviation and the testers are called "pilots"

God knows why they try weird stuff but they do

Earth to Voyager 2: Standby for connection – after we tip this water out of the dish

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rusty scuppers?

Canberra doesn't get much frost (if any at all - normally it barely touches freezing during winter) - more importantly it doesn't get much rain when it's that cold and it doesn't get much in the way of high winds either

weep holes are fine, but they may drop water from the subreflector straight down onto the receiver electronics - which is "undesireable". Tipping it out avoids the sensitive bits

Bonus features: Sony uses Blu-ray tech to simulate 466Mbps laser link from the stratosphere to space

Alan Brown Silver badge

No need for water or minerals or energy

Therefore the only viable reason is to harvest us for their fast food restaurants

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Limit the speed?

If you're in the UK, there are actually speed limits for cycles and other vehicles(*) on shared paths (6mph unless signposted otherwise). The fact that they're widely ignored is another matter altogether

(*) Eg: invalid carriages, that's why they have limiters

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sound?

"beats upon the brain"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Clop - clop - clop - clop - ....

Cargo swallow

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Silence please!

Seeing as it's not April 1st, and lots of reserach has already been done into this

The original idea of noisemakers was to only work up to about 10-20km/h (where tyre noise is enough to do the job anyway) and be relatively quiet. The intent is to stop them sneaking up on people in carparks, not warn them 200 metres out

EU regulations on EV pedestrian alerting noise emitters have only existed for 9 years and already cover this. Stand in front of a Leaf sometime. It's fairly unobstrusive

I still like the idea of a jetsons flitter, but the dictated noise is basically shaped "white noise" - which is better for allowing people to stereolocate the direction than single tones are (this was discovered 40 years ago when trying to find better ambulance tones. A burst of white noise worked far better than bare "blues and twos" in allowing drivers and pedestrians to work out where the thing was coming from and getting out of the way)