* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Brit firm fined £200k for banging on about missold PPI in 11.4 million nuisance calls

Alan Brown Silver badge

"oddly enough about the same time the UK call centres were shut down/limited to essential services"

I've suspected for a while that the real way to stop these kinds of calls would be to employ a few hitmen to knock on the doors of the company directors concerned, making it clear that they have a nice family and if they would like to continue having a nice family they need to stop the behaviour

Then again, if they keep it up, they'll eventually reach someone sociopathic enough to do society such a favour for free

Alan Brown Silver badge

More and more people are using crowdsourced reject lists.

Samsung phones have them built in now and there are androids apps like Call Control as well

it wuld be more useful for the ICO and Ofcom to gather reports from these systems but "Not invented here" and "chocolate teapots" spring to mind - these regulators primarily exist in the UK for appearances, not actual consumer protection

US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: he just needs to be tried in court for the rape allegation.

In this instance, the complainants didn't want it so the Swedish authorities would be hardpressed to make anything stick. I'd happily argue that stealthing is rape but it's their call in the end

There are millions of other cases which are much more clear cut and where the offenders walk free. The vast majority of sexual offences occur between people who know and trust each other but virtually the only ones which actually get to court are the (rare by comparison) violent attacks on a stranger

Something is terribly wrong with the system and society in general

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Transportation

Australia does whatever the USA tells it to, so they're highly likely to put Asshat on a passing US military transporter headed stateside

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Out of the loop here

there are no "good guys" and "bad guys". Merely "bad guys" on both sides who believe they are the "good guys" (or justify it by being on the side of the "good guys")

Belgian boffins dump Starlink dish terminal's firmware, gain root access and a few ideas

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Geofencing development

The primary reason for geofencung right now is to ensure dishes stay more or less where they're expected to be and don't cluster too much in one cell. Beamforming still makes for a big spot from 500-1500km away and right now there are only 920 active birds

I'm expecting that once tge first shell is fully active (1440 birds) they'll start relaxing restrictions and selling more terminals. There are already that many in orbit but it will take 3 more months or so to get them all in position (starlink.sx is useful to visualise thjngs)

There are at least 2 more shells to be built. The sun synchronous set only has a dozen flying so far and these are the only ones with fricking lasers onboard at the moment. The first 2 launches worth are already in the process of being retired and deorbited

What's more interesting than where ground stations are popping up is seeing where they AREN'T. I think national geofencing will quickly be bypassed by determined individuals without governments being able to really do much about it. (The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it)

Suck on this: El Reg forces dog hair, biscuit crumbs, and disconcertingly sticky stains down two mini vacuums

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: destroyed another robot vacuum cleaner

"The Husqvarna AWD robot mower is so powerful that it can shoot dog crap for some distance"

So is a standard petrol mower. At least you're not standing next to it when that happens....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Dog urine

"we were forced to explain to the manufacturer why they wouldn't be getting their review unit back in a functional state"

It failed real world testing

This isn't exactly a unique problem

BOFH: Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can listen to you ... It keeps me stable for days

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Box Tickers Anonymous United .......

a paragraph about moose bites might be amusing

Epic vs. Apple Australian side quest allowed to resume

Alan Brown Silver badge

Precedents

"The Court also just fancied the idea of testing the case in Australia, rather than waiting for a US precedent to ponder"

Ponder is exactly correct. Precedents are only set in the jurisdiction of the original court. Elswehere they're merely foreign caselaw

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ah yes CentOS the linux distro for those who like their packages years out of date.

"the version number of a package isn't really a good indicator on how old it is"

If you have any idea how many problems that causes when XYZ researcher wants ABC library version and RH only shows it's AAA (but is ABC internally).... Toys and prams happen a lot

The result is usually very NON-portable software which requires endless tweakery to install anywhere else

Alan Brown Silver badge

There's a lot of pressure leaning towards a *buntu distro inside the sceince community

People have used Redhat foreever because "everyone uses Redhat", so all the packages are RPMed

Once it becomes too damned inconvenient to keep that model (and it is, because things like the latest version of IDL won't run on it anymore!), then there will be a mass push to something else

which is happening, but older staff are resisting, this is leading to pockets of "geurilla computing" being setup "in spite of" the computing support groups in most places, not with their assistance.....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Outrage

This was the same Sony which put rootkits on their DVDs and CDs. They knew what they were doing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Scientific Linux etc

Scientific Linux was specifically extensions on CentOS for the high energy physics community (think of it as more like Ubuntu Studio vs Ubuntu or similar)

It got discontinued because most of what was in it was rolled into Centos mainstream and there was no longer a need for it.

The increasing brokenness of RH over the last 10-15 years (where package versions may or may not reflect what's actually inside them thanks to backports of various parts of upstream, leading to people deciding that XYZ is out of date and they MUST compile a local version instead) has been increasingly driving the science community into the loving arms of Debian and Ubuntu or Suse

RH have been making it increasingly clear for a long time that "stability" trumps "usability" and being able to run on the latest hardware - their cash cow customers are financial institutions with large fleets of near-identical systems mostly running as thin(ish) clients and everyone else is a nuisance

There's a lot of inertia involved in "still using Redhat" in many places when the reality is that its model of heavily customised and misleadingly versioned RPMs doesn't fit most organisations using it and hasn't since the mid 2000s. Trying to bang that square peg into a round hold makes for a lot of extra administrative effort which can be better spent elsewhere

One good deed leads to a storm in an Exchange Server

Alan Brown Silver badge

"They are just Comments, that's what the 'C' stands for, they're not requirements"

Unfortunately this was the attitude of a number of mail software authors - invariably leading to their systems being trivially borkable or buriable (novell mail would go down in a screaming spiral of doom if mail from Postmaster to postmaster (no @) was fired at it, as one example)

It's not a surprise that the DNS relaying blacklists mostly contained sendmail 8.6 systems simply because of its ubiqity and inability to find someone responsible for the ancient systems it was running on - but the vast majority of the rest of the entries were brokenware of some sort or another that should never have been left exposed to the world

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: easy

not just mail.

ARMM ARMMMM ARMMMMMMM

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sort of, guilty as charged

Some of us saw it and setup honeypots to make a point to unwanted marketers....

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The future is coming

starlink uplinks might have a lot of traction in times future....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The future is coming

"The thieving gits helped themselves to a couple of pallets of the cheapest laptops,"

Easy to sell, no questions asked, nobody bothers with serial numbers on cheap commodity kit

"walked past £££ worth of highend CPUs and gfx cards (a small box of the highend gfx was worth more than the laptops) and ignored the stupid money servers."

All of which are a different story if you try to sell with serial numbers obliterated or altered

They knew exactly what they were doing

Why won't you copper-ate? Openreach offers capped fibre line rental to wholesalers in bid to shift all that FTTP

Alan Brown Silver badge

Ofcom Area 2

As soon as Starlink offers UK dialtone, the whole of the UK is potentially in this category

I'm beinh bombarded with adverts for FTTH - the rollout ended about 200 yards up the street and it's not due for the rest of my area until 2026

With rotting copper in the ground and the VDSL circuit dropping out every time it rains plus PPPoE flapping wildly under load - Openreach claiming there's nothing wrong with it - I expect they'll be losing most of their customers very quickly if Starlink's density claims are supported. 300MB/s at the current advertised price undercuts what ISPs are selling it for, let alone the claimed increases in speeds in the pipeline

RISC-V boffins lay out a plan for bringing the architecture to high-performance computing

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: OpenRISC

Simple: trade wars

The USA has been attempting to stop China developing x86 and ARM via various sanctions

MIPS has its own sets of issues and the longsoong line seems to have stagnated

Power and sparc would likely face the same attempts at blocking IP flow if the USA perceives them as a threat path

That leaves the ground-up open path open

EE and Three mobe mast surveyors might 'upload some virus' to London Tube control centre, TfL told judge

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Come up with some better excuses!"

The best one I can think of is wind blowing through the ironwork setting up an aoelian harp and vibrating the entire fricking building

Might sound a bit far fetched but I've actually encountered something like this on building roofs transmitting vibrations into the floors below - In some cases only when the wind is blowing from a specific direction

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Open door policy?

" you wouldn't want a surveyor stumbling on it by accident..."

More likely tripping OVER it in the stairwell....

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to build a semiconductor foundry is 5 years ago

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Big customer said "we don't need any chips"

"Now the auto industry complains of shortages."

Except Toyota: Because they sat down and analysed what would happen if they cancelled orders along with worst case scenarios about how long it would take for new orders to start flowing into their warehouses

Hence WHY Toyota's production lines worldwide are unaffected

Alan Brown Silver badge

if you are seen to be gouging, people notice and will treat you accordingly when things return to normal

This is seen with petrol stations. You can make a lot of money in the short term if there's a shortage and you're the only place around with tanks, but the long term cost is likely to destroy your business as people shun the business afterwards

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: True for some parts

"There doesn't currently seem to be a shortage of all those essential but often forgotten parts."

There is in the automotive sector, but that's for the pure and simple reason that manufacturers(*) cancelled orders then found themselves at the back of the order queue when they attempted to pick up the slack

(*) With one notable exception: Toyota - creators of the lean manufacturing system that the rest of the world aped. Analysis in the wake of ther 2011 Earthquake and tsunami identified semiconductor supply as vulnerable to severe disruption (it took nearly a year for Japanese fabs to fully recover) and Toyota consequently undertook to carry enough stock of critical components to be able to ride out shortages - even though this meant thery needed to increase warehouse holding of electronic components to around 2-3 months buffer

The point and objective of the Toyota "just in time" system isn't to carry MINIMUM stock, but to avoid carrying EXCESS inventory - something that accountants at most other manufacturers utterly missed in their drive to drive down costs by decreasing stock levels to absolute minimums across the board instead of minimum SAFE levels to ensure production stability

(ie: what happened to automakers was 100% self-inflicted because MBA monkeys just looked at the picture on the cover page of a presentation and copied that instead of taking the time to understand the aims, objectives and philosophy of a successful system (there are entire libraries devoted to books about the "Toyota methodology")). Of course they can't now admit they screwed up because stockholders will crucify them....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Is this fair?

"Hint: it's all about the next quarterly report, baby!"

and that's WHY the Asian manufacturers are stomping all over western vulture capitalist-driven traditional managment companies

MBAs are pocketing fat bonuses and getting out of dodge for cutting back costs by shedding staff and infrastructure investments but the reality is that they're "making money" by selling off - not the family silverware - but the tools of the trade needed to actually work and make more tools of the trade, as well as failing to invest in the people with knowledge of how to do it

Companies with slightly longer outlooks may seem less profitable, but they're able to weather the lean times and can afford to invest in upgrades when opportunists are simply asset stripping and running equipment into the ground

In this round of 'Real life or Black Mirror episode', drones that hunt down humans by listening to their screams

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What a pong

washing machines and dryers end up smelling equally bad - keep them clean for the same reason

UK government bows to pressure, agrees to delay NHS Digital grabbing the data of England's GP patients

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 1st July, 1st September

at some point the possibility of dosing parliamentary drinking water with sodum fluroacetate starts having a lot of appeal

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Matt Hancock to involve patients

As seen with motorway consultations, the results aren't changed. The consultation is done after the decisoins have been made and contracts signed off on

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Summon the lawyers!

Surrey County Council have passed a bylaw prohbiting running cables across the footpath - this is the same council which refused point blank to allow any on-street chargers for 12 years by simply placing all requests to consider them in the circular file (no applications in the system as none had been accepted) and giving an identical "we're thinking about it" response from 2003 to 2017

Other councils are allowing cable gulleys or cable protectors to be used

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: British Standard Method

"unfortunately they were armed only with a tin of black paint."

The original thinking was that councils wouldn't dare just paint over the evidence as it took mere seconds to redo it, but people didn't reckon on typical British mentality

It'd be interesting to know who came up with that particular harebrained response to the problem. A local newspaper could have a lot a of fun with it ("council paying people to paint the road instead of fixing it! etc)

Nonetheless, it usually only takes a couple of rounds of paint and some very pointed questions in public for councillors to get the message that covering it up is a bad idea

Oracle hits UK reseller with lawsuit for allegedly reselling grey market Sun hardware

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Oracle offloading SUN and SPARC IP to someone that can do something good with it."

That ship has sailed. Even Fujitsu has dropped Sparc architecture and there is no more OS development going on (or linux SPARC development - because people can't get the hardware)

What's still there is life support stuff. It's running because it's running and nobody's decided that the risk of not not finding replacement hardware is higher than the "too hard" task of porting to something else.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"How would it be if GM starts suing someone for selling a Chevy Camaro to Europe ?."

This more-or-less happened with secondhand Jeeps being sold into New Zealand - copyright claims were filed and thrown out.

In a similar vein, Australian Ford Falcons were rebranded when sold into the UK because Ford started making very loud noises at the importers (these were mostly turned into hearses)

It still happens with books - it's illegal to diirectly import and sell US market titles in Europe or AU/NZ thanks to copyright issues and Apple maintain an iron fist on distribution via copyright (to the point in the 1990s where it was cheaper to fly first class from Australia/NZ to Los Angeles, stay a week, buy a top end Mac system there, import it and pay all the applicable taxes bringing it home than buy one locally in Auckland/Sydney)

Alan Brown Silver badge

> In terms of the lawsuit, it seems the gist is "we sold these servers in location X and you're not allowed to sell them on in location Y" which seems rather fussy.

It's a claim which is explicitly illegal in a number of countries - pull this in Australia as one for-instance and the ACCC will go after you for restraint of trade behaviour. Copyright cartel activities are strongly disliked by a number of regulators

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: location, location, location..

Water moderated reactors are built that way to contain steam explosions. If you don't have water in contact with the radioactives then you don't need nearly as much mass in your containment building

If you don't have containment buildings like that to contain steam explosions in water moderated systems..... well, Chernobyl is one example

the issue is that the limiting temperature of fission reactions is 1150C (doppler effects), so you need a coolant which doesn't boil below that temperature.

Water works for demonstration purposes. The Nautilus reactor was small and effectively a "laboratory glassware demonstrator". Alvin Weinberg was pretty unhappy that industry took his design and scaled it up to silly sizes. That's why he came up with a much safer industrial prototype design (the molten salt reactor)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Missing the point

not JUST Monju

EVERY SINGLE Sodium cooled reactor has caught fire at some point in its operational cycle. If you want t build safe nuclear power systems, using materials which burn furiously when exposed to oxygen or water is a spectacularly bad idea in the atmosphere of this planet

Molten salt was proven safe and impossible to burn or rot brains (which molten lead coolant fumes did to russian reactor techs) at the exact same time that a bunch of reckless Californian yahoos were burning sodium nuclear waste not far from the headwaters of San Diego's water supply

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-NKdWV5SCg

The dickwads disposed of sodium by floating it in 44-gallon drums in a pond and shooting holes in them!!!

Monju was a lot more carefully operated but that didn't help when 10 tons of molten sodium from the secondary loop ended up in the basement. It might have been non-radioactive but it was still catastrophic

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Laptop + Projector = two computers?

Did you swap the whiteboard pen for a permanent sharpie?

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Marketing missed a trick

> I just want a 30Tb HDD of my own

Samsung can already sell you a 2.5" easily concealable drive for the purpose

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Is this new?

Chinook had 2 sets of heads on each platter

This sticks with one head per platter, and is essentially stacking 2 HDDs in one case

heads in an assembly are accessed individually, not in parallel, because thermal (and other) effects mean that calibration will almost always be out if parallel access is attempted. The only way to allow 2 heads in the stack to be active is to have them pivoting independently (ie: two voice coil actuators, etc) and the complexity is hideous whether you do it with two independent head assemblies on each side of the platters (Chinook) or have two mechanically separated head assemblies on the same pivot

Whilst Seagate et al ate putting a brave face on it, SSDs have been taking their lunchboxes away for quite a while. They shut down their main research labs a decade back and HAMR/.MAMR is taking a long time to bring the holy grail of reliably increased density, whilst the shenanigans in the wake of the 2011 Thai floods convinced a lot of buyers that getting away from mechanical drives (supply choke points and opportunistic profiteering vendors) was a worthwhile pursuit - last year's shenanigans with submarined prosumer drives being slipped into NAS channels didn't help their cause..

As much as they talk up these capacities, Soiid state is closing beat them on longevity/endurance a long time ago and is closing rapidly in on mechanical device cost at all densities and a lot of buyers are minded not to reward past bad behaviour by actively avoiding by giving HDD vendors their SSD purchases

Supreme Court narrows Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Misusing access not quite the same as breaking in

Alan Brown Silver badge

hopefully this will result in the law being reframed to cover such cases. State penal codes may already cover this in some cases (if not, they should)

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The Spanish Inquisition

as long as you don't round over multiple iterations (long story behind this comment....)

Apple sued in nightmare case involving teen wrongly accused of shoplifting, driver's permit used by impostor, and unreliable facial-rec tech

Alan Brown Silver badge

isn't lieing to the court known as "perjury" in most parts of the world?

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Dark Monitor

"standard procedure was to get them to squint at the screen to see if they could actually see something."

The other test for this is to shine a torch(flashlight) onto the screen at point blank range and see if things start to become faintly viewable

BOFH: But we think the UK tax authorities would be VERY interested in how we used COVID support packages

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sneaky

bits of him, at any rate. In an envelope....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stairwell or Elevator

Elevators tend to catastrophically fail upwards, as a poor young lady found out last week.

Elevator doors on the other hand, may pop open at any time and people tend to walk in from the hallway without looking

US nuclear weapon bunker security secrets spill from online flashcards since 2013

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Secret nuclear bunker

I wouldn't classify being missed by a smelly brown megasplat as unfortunate

Give me a (tax) break: UK broadband plumber Openreach to almost double the number of rural premises to receive FTTP

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's hard to say this...

"but I'm actually impressed with how they're finally moving things along."

Starlink is jollying things along nicely isn't it?

Who gave dusty Soviet-era spacecraft that unwanted lick of paint? It was an idiot, with a spraycan, in Baikonur

Alan Brown Silver badge

FSVO "dodging security" - the guards have been remarkably friendly to people who were respectful of the site and let them view everything freely. That's unlikely to be the case from now on

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How low the mighty have fallen

all those downvotes, but it's true - the shuttle was the ultimate camel and ended causing more problems for NASA than it solved