* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

You geeks have inherited the Earth, but what are you going to do with it?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: History is bunk

The 1956 pandemic (emergence of H1N2) was relatively mild but it still killed about 4 million people worldwide - and it was notable as the first year that flu vaccines utterly failed (they were all geared towards H1N1 - which went extinct in humans that year). The 1968 pandemic (emergence of H1N3) killed around 2 million

Fusses WERE made. One of the reasons they didn't hit as hard as they could have was that 1918 left a legacy of watchfulness, living memoey and early warning systems which was formalised in the 1970s after Ebola and finally ended up in the USA with its own administration under Obama after many years as a sub department

MERS and SARS should have been pandemics. They were headed off. The Mango Menace destroyed the early warning intelligence gathering system which could have warned that Chinese regional administrators were covering things up from the central medical oversight authority and perhaps resulted in COVID being another footnote in history instead of the worst Pandemic since 1918 (comparable to the 1895 "russian flu" pandemic which it appears closely related to and only slightly less deadly than 1918)

If you don't think fusses were made in 1895 and 1918, then you haven't studied history, and if you're old enough to remember 1956, then you're too young to remember how the experienced adults in the room reacted to it.

The biggest problem with COVID is that a really bad pandemic is beyond living memory and the last one was so bad that most areas of the world suppressed it from folk memory by not talking about it. Those orphans in 1920s movies needed no explanation to 1920s audiences and 1930s kids simply took the meme for granted

Not the kind of note you want to see fluttering from an ATM

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Its the graphics

Don't forget Windows security model is rooted in VMS and has more granularity than *nix

But the default is/was to turn almost all of that off and "run as root"

There are far worse things than windows lurking in industrial applications

A proposal to beat below-the-belt selfies: Crowdsourced machine learning using victims' image stashes

Alan Brown Silver badge

section 127 of the telecommunications act applies though

Is it decadent that I use four different computers each day, at different times?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Landscape mode

upside down portrait is there but locked out on most. It can be enabled with 3rd party stuff

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Landscape mode

1 swipe and a tap on mine

Declassified files reveal how pre-WW2 Brits smashed Russian crypto

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Find it difficult to believe

Like for instance, sending them as chess moves....

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: One Time Pads.

It's not JUST the content of the communications that's informative

Metadata is equally important. The fact that Bob speaks to Alice regularly, but Alice speaks to John and John speaks to Fred and Fred is part of another group under investigation is all useful for establishing the way a criminal network is built up even if it's carefully broken into cells

Google Chrome's upcoming crackdown on ad-blockers and other extensions still really sucks, EFF laments

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Adverts are not the price you pay

"Google needs to catch up and fast."

It won't, because Google manglement is the old Doubleclick people

taking over that outfit was a poison pill

After deadly 737 Max crashes, damning whistleblower report reveals sidelined engineers, scarcity of expertise, more

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The article leaves out important details

"Those pilots used their training to override the computer and land safely."

The flight before the Lion Air crash had a third pilot riding in the cockpit and HE was the one who saved the aircraft by noting the oddities. The guys wrestling with the controls were too busy trying to cope with situational overload to figure out what had happened

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Got nothing to do with self-regulation..

"But the bean-counters decided they were just going to churn out more and more variation of the 737 so they would not have to go through the whole certification's process for a whole new aircraft"

Nope. It was made clear to the beancounters that airlines would not buy 7J7s and what they wanted was a newer 737, so the beancounters overruled safety concerns and "made it so"

This predates McD arrival. The rot had already set in. McD just cemented the deal

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Got nothing to do with self-regulation..

The counterpoint to this is that the 737NG predated McD being on the scene and THAT airplane should never have been produced either (It was produced by accountants/management, demanded by customers and then the engineers told to make it work)

The bodging and covering up of dangerously substandard fuselage ribs on 737NG production lines also predated the arrival of McD on the scene

There's confirmation bias in the assertion. The truth is that Boeing was already substantially along the road that the import of McD manglement took and if it hadn't been, they wouldn't have been able to drive the company to the extremes that happened

Boeing's woes trace to the introduction of the 747. Massive restructuring of debts in the late 60s resulted in banks and financiers being in charge by 1971. After that the safety/engineering culture was steadily eroded and with or without McD along for the ride something similar would have eventually happened sooner or later (perhaps later, perhaps sooner. it's an unknown) - facilitated by the widespread regulatory capture environment in the USA (not just the FAA - the FTC and PUCs are shining examples of it still in action today)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pilots were no longer in charge

The FAA had already been documented shopping whistleblowers back to Boeing in the early 2000s

THAT was the point where regulators worldwide should have sat up and taken notice

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Procedural changes

"How long before an engineer who refuses to certify whatever Boeing wants is fired/retrenched/demoted/shifted to some other job by Boeing?"

about minus 20 years

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The People ARE The System.

LiFePo4 are slightly less energy dense than LiIon but they don't burn

Boeing chose the denser item over the safer one

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: In Case of MCAS: Logical Reasoning, Calculus

"This is how the auto folks think and it seems it is a quite reliable method."

When you can pull a plane with 100pax over to the shoulder, let me know

In addition, let me know when such safety systems are regarded as adequate on trains or busses

Now lookup the Birthday Paradox for an example of why your assumptions are wrong

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: In Case of MCAS: Logical Reasoning, Calculus

This is exactly what the customers DIDN'T want

The reason for flying 737NG/Max is that you can take any 737 pilot and slot him in the pointy end of any 737 with (at most) 1-2 hours reading the familiarisation manuals

This is WHY Southwest and others don't fly mixed fleets and WHY they didn't buy A320s and WHY they pressured Boeing so heavily to keep making 737s

As soon as a pilot has to be "certified" for another plane, he;'s either more expensive, requires hours in seat to keep the certification or less flexible in terms of scheduling (usually all of the above)

Everything that was done to the MAX (including leaving stuff out of the manual) was to AVOID the need to certify it separately to other 737s as far as the meatsack at the controls was concerned

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The People ARE The System.

"we ran all the tests and hey worked" - the testing mantra of European car electronics (which is why they break so easily outside the warranty period)

"no matter what we did, we could not break it" - hello Toyota

Alan Brown Silver badge

The FAA is no longer regarded as a trustworthy agency by other agencies and their homework is being checked by other countries. It will stay that way for a long time

CAA (china) approval in particular is critical for Boeing. China is Boeing's single biggest market and without it they're sunk

What's of more impact for them than the 737Max debacle is how the change in attitude from external regulators has impacted the 777X testing/approval process - notice how this has been dragging out? - and a fine tooth comb is being pulled over the entire 787 approval process

Alan Brown Silver badge

"After the FAA budget was cut, they had to cut back enforcement"

You have it the wrong way around

The budget was cut to ENSURE that enforcement was reduced

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

This is a classic sign of regulatory capture. If you see it happening regularly you know you have a problem

Ahem*UK*ahem*OFCOM*ahem*

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

"The big catch is psychological - if you make a conceptual error in design or implementation, you're unlikely to spot it when you come to test.."

Yup. This is why you have proofreaders too

The problem of regulatory capture in the USA is pernicious and widespread. The FAA is merely the most visible part of it in this instance

In a lot of cases it's moved from simple "marking one's own homework" to flat out corruption and using the regulatory agency as an anticompetition tool

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

Whilst there's some truth in that statement, the reality is that MBAs and financiers have been in control of Boeing since 1971 when it nearly went bankrupt building the first 747s

As for "Why Boeing kept building 737s?" - there's a more prosaic and pragmatic answer - they TRIED to introduce replacements (7J7 and the newer program that's been dragging on forever) but airlines wouldn't buy them and insisted on 737s instead

This happened to the extent that the customers dictated newer engines on the same airframe - the 737Max was rather infamously announced by airlines before Boeing had even committed to making it

Had there been engineers in charge instead of MBAs, they might have been able to resist the pressures on rather obvious safety grounds. Instead Management dictated the introduction of the 737NG

It was also MBA management who allowed substandard airframes and defective parts to be installed in several hundred 737NGs, with the 2003 whistleblowers (stuff was being covered up on the assembly lines and signed off by management at least as as far back as 1997) being shopped back to Boeing by the FAA within a week and they were subsequently driven out of the company

737Max didn't "just happen out of the blue". It's the product of 40+ years of regulatory and management misfeasance predating McD manglement arriving on the scene

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "scientific testing" of safety is done by the manufacturing companies

" Proper scientific tests will give reproducible and reliable results"

Until the unscientific MBAs decide to rewrite the reports

The issue isn't (usually) with technical staff

New submarine cable to link Japan, Europe, through famed Northwest Passage

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Who are the customers?

" one use-case will be high frequency stock and commodities trading."

This has been postulated as the real moneyspinner long term for Starlink. Transatlantic latency would be significantly lower than anything cable can do whilst transpacific is simply unbeatable even with polar cables

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Who are the customers?

fibre has bigger bandwidth than satellites

Almost all the existing europe/asia big data cables cross the Sinai and have proven susceptable to dragging anchors at the north end of the Red Sea. IIRC there was an event where ONE ship knocked out 4 cables in 20 minutes whilst waiting to transit the Suez Canal

Landbased cables have their own sets of problems and vulnerabilities no matter how hard operators try (where diggers don't succeed in screwing things up, thieves do it instead)

This is sorely needed geographic diversity

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Avoiding NSA tapping?

USN Jimmy Carter is on the case

Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected

Alan Brown Silver badge

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that life in a solar system has a tendency to spread to other planets thanks to impact events

Life spreading beyond the immediate zone is highly unlikely though, unless you're talking about something like a couple of stars passing near enough to each other that their debris clouds interact

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Dna

"Complex enough chemicals for the cycles of life to be kickstarted"

You can do that from inorganics and lightning. That much has been done in jars in a laboratory as long ago as the 1920s

Having organic chemicals is a long LONG way from assembling them into building blocks for complex stuff and an even longer way from a finished product

On the flipside, there's a fairly logical argument that life will probably form anywhere there's enough energy available as a way of maximising entropy and also that the basic building blocks will generally follow the ratios we already see because they're the ones mostly seen across the universe - but there may be local peturbations and the actual local permutations are a matter of conjecture

ie: Life is likely to be carbon-based (not silicon) and simpler versions respire using hydrogen before moving to faster oxidisation reactions. That still doesn't mean we'll recognise it when we see it

Nature is random, but given billions of years to keep rolling the dice it's going to hit a yahtzee every so often - the thing is that even on earth it's done that with different combinations at different times - mollsuc vs vertebrate eyes being a classic example (mollusc eyes are the right way around, vertebrate eyes came 200 million years later and are inside out)

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pronouncing...

only if you're a Pixie

Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Science.

Sorry, I've been blinded

Malaysia tweaks copyright law to hit streamers of copyright-infringing content

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Unless you're Paul McCartney's wife

She obviously new there was an issue - you don't declare prescription medicine as a necklace unless you're up to no good

US Commerce Dept says China has brain-control weaponry

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Brain controls weapon or weapon controls brain?

"UK did fight and win the Opium Wars against China in order to retain the right to sell opium in China"

And that's something that China _really_ hasn't forgotten. It might get glossed over in British history lessons but not in Chinese ones

Upcoming trade negotiations are going to be.....interesting

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Aren’t most weapons brain controlled…

"That's why we're rather touchy about countries moving from the dollar, especially for energy purchases"

It's a bit late for that, considering that the Chinese are doing at Wuwei now what Nixon prevented Weinberg doing at Oak Ridge in 1969

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Aren’t most weapons brain controlled…

the current crop of antigravity machines rely on airfoils or raw thrust. the hard part is finding something to replace these. Jonathon Livingston might know

East Londoners nicked under Computer Misuse Act after NHS vaccine passport app sprouted clump of fake entries

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Inside job

"If they are internal and as part of their job have access. You can't do them for unauthorised access."

Tell that to various police staff (sworn and civilian) regularly prosecuted under the CMA for noodling around in excess of their authorisation

Alan Brown Silver badge

Most? Nearly all!

"Most of the people in ICUs now are unvaxxed"

More than "most". It's around 98%

Vaccination works. It may not always stop you CATCHING Covid, but it sure as hell bolsters your defences if you do catch it

I caught covid very early in the pandemic - before vaccines were avilable and before it was even realised as a pandemic. I had 3 MONTHS off work, have lost half my lung capacity, permanent hearing and eye damage and amd still dealing with other aftereffects nearly 2 years later

If you want to roll those dice, that's fine, but why should anyone pay your medical expenses when a vaccination is cheap insurance? And are you willing to pay the medical expenses of anyone you infect?

Cryptocurrency 'rug pulls' cheated investors out of $8bn in 2021 – report

Alan Brown Silver badge

One of the things that should sink in is that if journalists regularly get it utterly badly wrong on subjects you DO know about, you should expect they're equally bolloxing things up in stuff you don't know about too

I've seen very few who didn't want to push a particular barrow or even worse had Dunning-Krugered themselves. It's sometimes a relief when they cover stuff they're completely ignorant on because they screw things up so badly that _everyone_ can see it

Alan Brown Silver badge

calling it a fiat currency or anything else doesn't change the elephant in the room:

A currency only has value whilst people believe it does. The moment that changes there's a run on it

The USD has quadrillions of debt behind it, essentially making its value negative, but as a trading token that really doesn't matter - until it does (ie: people start using another currency as the default international trading token) and at that point all the debt becomes due instead of being able to be repaid in more of the same trading tokens. This is what happened to GBP when USD took over as the default international trading currency after WW2

If you look at US foreign policy as "ensuring USD remains the default international trading currency" then a lot of things start making more sense. Use of Euro and Rembini for international settlements are a direct threat to USA national security

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 66,239

Looking at Bitcoin and the original stuff that went with it I was always convinced that what I was looking at it was related to the hashcash smtp mail postage stamp project

I could be (and probably am) wrong

The problem with Cryptocoins isn't that they exist - they're fine for transactional use - issues start when you attempt to use them as a "get rich quick" speculative vehicle. Like any pyramid, only the first few levels make any money

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Jet-Age is coming to an end

El-Musko is now pushing Sabatier process as his fueling source.

The problem with THAT is that to be viable he'll need molten salt nuclear power (conventional nuclear isn't hot enough) and the only such working(*) reactor in the world is currently in the Gobi Desert - a 2MW rebuild of the 1960s 8MW Oak Ridge Experiment aimed at validating Alvin Weinberg's work before moving onto 100MWe production

(*) SHOULD be working. It was scheduled for criticality in October 2021, but no news on whether that's happened,

Yes, that's the Thorium reactor design that Lester was championing on this site all those years ago

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fatter Albert..

" their other problem for airports was the cost of all the gate modifications needed to handle them"

No different to what was needed back in the 1970s for B747s or the 1950s for B707s

B777s were introduced with folding wingtip options because of the gate issue. Nobody ever bought that option and gates were modified. B777X has the folding wingtips but I wonder how many will be de-optioned.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Fuel prices are in the process of snapping back to "normality" after several years of price wars aimed at putting American tight oil producers (and Russia) out of business

The world passed "peak oil" in 2003 - "peak oil" doesn't mean "peak production", it means the "easy/sweet" oil is mostly gone and what's left is both harder to get at (tight oil) and/or requires more expensive refining techniques (sour crudes)

You can expect to see $100+/BBL pricing resume again. Once it hits $200/BBL then alternate (non-fossil) sources are viable - but it also makes hub/spoke airline models the most economic way to operate again. A380 was simply the right plane at the wrong time and the wrong time wasn't something anyone in the industry could really forsee (but if it is reintroduced it needs better engines and vastly better wake turbulence reduction)

BWB and Vbody aircraft are not practical for self-loading cargo (PAX) use. The 90 second evacuation rule won't be feasible

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Impressive acoustic qualities"

Akin to a "hole in the noise" when it flies above London. You look up to see what's missing and see it hanging in the air in precisely the way that bricks don't.

Insurance firm Admiral fails to grab phone location data of 'fraud' claimant's mother

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Parallel Construction

The fun one is "breach of privacy" type cases such as CCTV being published of a crime being committed without blurring faces of the miscreants

In that case, the only people with standing are the identifiable ones and they have to be willing to stand in front of a judge and say "yes, this footage is of me and I'd like it removed from public view"

At which point they've effectively put a noose around their own neck (and there were/are exemptions to privacy laws when it comes to identification for criminal behaviour etc)

West Sussex County Council faces two-year delay to replace ageing SAP system for Oracle

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

"One problem might be that they don't have enough people in their IT department for the existing product."

Having intereacted with the county council "IT departments" and their managers, it's a combination of "not enough people", "not enough skills" and a really bad case of Dunning-Kruger

Remember these were county councils that dropped in car parking charges on rural car parks to cover general revenue shortfalls (not legal as it happens), only to discover that motorists responded by staying away in droves. It's almost as if they could go to places which didn't have parking fees and chose to do so...

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Random

It's happened twice more since then, neither case was as bad as the Brazilian incident

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A winning strategy?

"Fighting ISIS is a case of spending enough money to move all the casualties to their side of the equation"

In a word, bullshit. The more casualties you cause, the more recruits you have.

The way to fight ISIS is to make people better off in the first place so they're not poor and desperate enough to even consider that joining up with nutters is a good idea

Comfortably well off people seldom turn into jihadists. The guy whose wife and kids have just been killed by a faceless remote enemy is a perfect candidate for the task (see: Luke Skywalker)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Technically fantastic but...

"the last thing you need is lots of 27mm high explosive ammunition arriving at speed"

As a reminder of this: about 50 years ago a USAF jet accidentally fired off ~30 rounds "outside the box" in a targetted paractice zone in the USA during a groudn attack exercise. They tore the roof off a school more than 15 miles away. Thankfully nobody was hurt but it makes the point about where these things land

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Technically fantastic but...

"£200,000 for the missile vs how much for a small drone?"

This is exactly the argument that has been made by various military types (including ship captains) for a while.

You can send an awful lot of $500 to $2500 drones to be shot down by $200k-$1M missiles and they defenders MUST shoot down every single one because you simply don't know which of the things may have an explosive or thermite load vs just be loaded with glitter

The other aspect of this is that defenders only have "so many" defence missiles to shoot at incoming devices, after which they have to leave the area, rely on phalanx (which also runs out of ammunition pretty quickly in such scenarios) or grit their teeth and hope

A land-based attacker with a few dozen/hundred drones can essentially render the defences of most warships or airbases obsolete by running them out of ammunition before sending in the nasty stuff. If the attacker has a few dozen hypersonic missiles the first few don't even need to be particularly precisely targetted in order to draw fire and leave things defenceless

As WW1 and industrial mechanisation changed warfare in unimaginable ways 100 years ago, the new varieties of small cheap semi-intelligent guided weapons are set to change things in future in ways that militarists can't currently conceive

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Licences

I use GPL, for the simple reason that nothing I do is highly original and I don't like seeing my work disappearing into someone's proprietary expensive product without acknowledgement

To my mind, a "must contribute back to the commons" rule is a form of enforcing "pay it forward"