* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Communication Workers Union to hold national ballot for members at BT, Openreach and EE over strike action

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Public utility should be provided by public entity.

"The GPO was a real shitshow."

What britain FORCED on its ottawa agreement partners via "buy british" policies was also a shitshow.

The NZPO signed an agreement in 1971 to purchase a bunch of NEC crossbar exchanges but were forced to buy STC equipment via UK and NZ government interference. That ended up costing 5 timres as much to install due to it not working as supplied and not doing things that the NEC kit did as standard without EXPESNIVE "optional" extras (a bit like how cabin heating was an optional extra in a 1970s British car, but you couldn't actually BUY a British car without a heater.....)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Public utility should be provided by public entity.

"Now, for the trains ..."

What did you expect when post 1948 what had happened was the British Leyland model (several competing companies rammed together under one roof with all the old managewment and rivalries failing to be removed, so treating each other as "the enemy" instead of looking outside the organisation where the dangers really lay)

Add 30 years of failure to invest and the result was inevitable. The fact that sucessive transport ministers had heavily family investments in road transport industries was "entirely coincidental" as they say (if you believe this, I have a drawbridge over the Thames to sell you)

The current open cronyism and graft in the British government (most visible since Regency days) is only notable for being OPEN. It's been like this for decades

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Public utility should be provided by public entity.

no need to renationalise

The issue is the vertically integrated monopoly and that's WHY New Zealoand cleaved the BT model when TCNZ offered it up - that cleaving was done by the Ministry of Commerce (not the comms regulator(*)) after detailing the economic damage that allowing rent-seekign behaviour had done in New Zealand AND the UK

Look at what's happened to Spark/Chorus over the last few years as a guide to what PROPERLY SEPARATED lines and serboices companies would be like

(*) Just like OFCOM, the NZ comms regulator was bleating that there was nothing wrong with the regulatory model and competition was working fine - which EMPHASISES that comms regulators need to stick with what they understand (technical regulation) instead of attempting to operate in areas well beyond their competence and training (competition, market manipulation and preventing anti-competitive/cartel behaviour)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: BT

"I guess my broadband provider is still using their infrastructure unfortunatey"

Helloooo SpaceX

Huawei's first desktop PC to be sold outside China is a sleek business machine with optional 'smart' keyboard

Alan Brown Silver badge

Train station - where trains stop

Bus station - where busses stop

I think you can see where I'm going with this

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "like your favourite coffee table book."

"other countries do it too but usually not as crazily"

Allow me to introduce you to Franglish (Quebecous are the worst)

Australia picks third fight with Big Tech, this time over browser and search on mobile devices

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The ACCC have a lot of enquiries,....

Starting with the telcos

The New Zealand model (which cleaved the BT model into a services ocmpany and a lines company) solved a lot of problems there, turning them from the world's poster child for how NOT to privatise your telcos (Taught as such in Eastern Europe!) to a progressive and dynamic market in less than 3 years

Dialtone companies "notionally separateed" from lines companies were able to restrict competition anyway via the simple expedient of "head office" looking over the "chinese wall" separation and directing the lines company in ways that disadvantaged competitors.

Who'd have thought it?

Memo to scientists. Looking for intelligent life? Have you tried checking for worlds with a lot of industrial pollution?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @tfb - Looking for that other technosignature

"Try to imagine how much will cost the last drop of oil "

No need. oil is already at 1% of ease of extraction as it was 100 years ago and as the price goes up alternatives are being found

an "oil economy" is predicated on oil being the cheap energy source and that was only every going to be a short term proposition. Richard Milhous Nixon has a lot to answer for his actions in 1972 (as does Henry Kissinger, who in 1973 locked the _world_ into depending on oil for "world peace" by transforming the US dollar from being gold backed to "black gold" backed instead)

100 year sform now our descendants will look at each other and quizzicly ask "why did they burn stuff as fantastically useful as OIL?"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Looking for that other technosignature

"firstly whether the radiological signatures of a nuclear war are likely to be unique enough to be detectible"

Realistically? No.

Fallout from weapons is both minor and shortlived. The long-term effects everyone worried about in the cold war (nuclear winter) was a result of many city-scale fires (Dresden/Tokyo, etc) carrying soot into the stratosphere where it can't be rained out in a short period of time

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @Wellyboot - nothing new here

Even removing a few asteroids is likely to have consequences, particularly if they're larger ones

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: nothing new here

If you don't vaporise the sails on the first pulse

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Astro Boy

It's down the hall next to the faculty of advanced Thaumatology

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "`Oumuamua, the first-known foreign interstellar object to visit the Solar System"

In order to brake, one must point exhaust in the direction of travel (more or less, assuming ballsitic trajectories, which is approximately true outside of orbital dynamics and holds reasonably well for interstellar travel)

Such exhaust would promptly be lit up by the star you're braking towards and show as an "inverted comet"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Interstellar distances are so large..."

FTL travel ls likely impossible in 3D space

This is why so many SF stories use the device of folding through higher dimensions to achieve the travel - ( A Wrinkle in Time, etc) at which point a starship may be superflous

This developer created the fake programming language MOVA to catch out naughty recruiters, résumé padders

Alan Brown Silver badge

this sounds like a fun lunchtime game....

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Back in my contracting days...

As an employer it strikes me as a way of eliminating recruiting outfits (set the trap, see who bites, ensure they're put on the "Never do busines with this outfit again" list - no need to even ENTER into arguments about it - and let everyone else know why you've done so)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What?

I'm tempted to add "experience in MOVA would be advantageous" and see what comes in

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I can't believe it's not real!

"I seem to remember there was a bug in the standard so you had to be careful designing the exercise so as not to use that bit of the standard."

It's not terribly robust in the presence of hawks/eagles

Starlink's latent China crisis could spark a whole new world of warcraft

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The Internet inteprets censorship as damage

And routes around it"

A full-on mesh topgraphy will be the death knell of regional censorship/gateways

Governments around the world have been frantically attempting to stuff the genie back into the bottle for some time bit it always slips through their fingers and Starlink may simply blow the entire "IWF"/"Great Firewall" issue out into the open where it can't be hidden

The Emperor really is naked and no number of palace guards menacing the population is going to keep them from eventually noticing

What this means is that policing actual criminality is going to have to change and the issues of "Intellectual copyright" reassessed (Hint: The USA was the world's largest industrial IP piracy operation in recorded history, actively encouraging and rewarding theft of ideas from other countries for nearly 200 years)

The article misses that it's RUSSIA who are most actively opposed to Starlink AND have bottlenecked Internet across the entire country to a few key gateways AND have actually isolated the entire country on several occations

WRT the financials of Starlink: Those laser links are the key. Starlink promises intercontinental linking of stock market hubs at latencies which existing dedicated multi-billion-dollar transatlantice fibre-optic cables can't match. once the income from that comes onstream the entire rest of the constellation could be turned off and it'd still be profitable

Why yes, I'll take that commendation for fixing the thing I broke

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Change control is good - when it is properly controlled

> Phone starts ringing. He ignores it - "no problem, they'll just get a coffee and reconnect".

If the client software can't handle a disconnection, then it's not enterprise grade anyway

(My reasoning on this: once you start using resiliant/distributed databases, server switches will cause client drops anyway. They software has to be able to cope with it happening)

There is a shitload of "Enterprise grade" software out there which is fragile as eggshells and shouldn't be there

There are also a nyumber of "Enterprise" of vendors who will respond to griping about this behaviour (or detailing the issues on review sites) by raising complaints with your employer instead of actually FIXING the brokenness

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Documentation

"Even more important, why things were not done that way?"

In such cases, not ONLY in the documentation but also as a comment in the config file adjacent to the item likely to be changed

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Experience is the best teacher

"Most of the time, the purpose of the change board is to make sure that adequate thought and planning has gone into the change"

Just like HOAs, a change board frequently gets taken over by someone who likes "power" and becomes difficult for the simple sake of being difficult

UK.gov about to release £500m funding for Shared Rural Network targeting countryside 4G notspots

Alan Brown Silver badge

SpaceX has entered the building

Already getting money in other parts of the world for doing exactly this AND DELIVERING

but....."not invented here" (and not enough handshakes on golf courses going on)

A borked bit of code sent the Hubble Space Telescope into safe mode, revealing a bunch of other glitches

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: alternate servicing..

an ion tug definitely could - and has been postulated as a way of extending lifespan as well as deorbiting it when the sad day comes (it's too big to allow to come down randomly)

Think it's about time for the next challenge? Check out these software vacancies on both sides of the pond

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: mmm, how about..

This has been a problem in the making for over 100 years

I strongly recommend reading Neville Shute's "Slide Rule" - the final straw that led to him emigrating to Australia and writing "No Highway" was being sacked and gagged by de Havilland for predicting the inflght breakups long before they actually happened - because DH management decided that as a dope-and frame aircraft maker they knew better than people who'd actually studied pressurised airliners built to date and incorporated protections against the very events that occured mid-flight - which DH management REMOVED "to save money" - the windows were a convenient fiction to avoid manslaughter charges against company bigwigs

Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I miss IBM keyboards

" but they are quite a bit lighter than my real 1992 Model M"

A lot of keyboards being produced around then were "heavy" by virtue of having a steel slug glued into the bottom, not because of some extra high quality chassis

The same trick was applied to Viscount phones to make them appear to be higher quality

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Smoking

Rule of thumb: the best cure for keyboards doused in any kind of beverage is a bucket of (clean) water and leave it in there

It's easier to dewater and clean something up than to deal with corrosion if it's left

NB: I did run into a reuters terminal which used keyboards that literally had foil strips on blocks of polyurethane foam on the ens of the keystems. Drying that out was problematic as the foam didn't like IPA

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Smoking

"There are ( and were in 2007 ) air filtration systems that were more than capable of removing enough smoke."

Try as you might (and many motorway services restairants did), these areas still leaked noxious smells

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Smoking

> if non smokers don't like it they can go somewhere else..."

We did., in droves. Pubs and restaurants are still picking up returning custom from people who got out of the habit of going out because of smokers

Jailed Samsung boss accused of abusing Propofol aka ‘the milk of amnesia’ or 'the drug that killed Michael Jackson'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A telescope of unusual size

Mine said that and i was fully concious (no anesthesia for me!), which made things difficult as handling the thing is difficult when the patient is giggling

Four women, including TV star, thought they were investing in a software business. It was a scam. Now the perp's going to jail

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: In the Navy!

I'd be more worried about the Navy Walruses

UK Space Agency will pay a new CEO £125,000 to run non-existent space programme

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: There can be only one...

T&T works out to something north of £12k per NHS nurse

The UK government budgetted and set aside 2.1% for their pay increase whilst only offering 1% (this is about £200 per nurse per year)

Where's the extra money gone?

Alan Brown Silver badge

£125k

won't buy much considering what's actually required for this role

This is definitely in the peanuts and monkeys department

OVH founder says UPS fixed up day before blaze is early suspect as source of data centre destruction

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fumming

The battery room of one phone exchange I worked in was a 10*10metre double-thick-walled bare concrete cell with direct external ventilation in the form of big "vent block" holes in the wall at ceiling and floor levels (the ones which look like curly decorations)

Never had any problems with birds or rats in there - or even spider webs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fumming

There are, but thanifully most sensible designs are pushing LiFe (which doesn't burn much)

Even so, don't put em in your equipment racks unless they're very small and have extra containment

Alan Brown Silver badge

that would make NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER - when a battery pack goes up nothing will stop it burning and it will outlast any extingushants you can provide

The only safe way to treat UPSes is to house them separately

Alan Brown Silver badge

Yup.

And I'll guarantee that anyone who pointed out the SPOF vulnerability was blasted with assurances "that will never happen"

Alan Brown Silver badge

This doesn't surprise me

About 30 years ago I repaired a 6kW UPS at a broadcast radio station and put it back into service

The following morning, the breakfast announcer walked into a building full of smoke (alarms hadn't gone off!), opened all the windows and carried on as usual. About 4 hours later that UPS went up in flames, taking out part of the building with it

Analysis showed the smoke had come from the transformer insulation having absorbed water from sitting idle/cold for 6 months and developed a shorted turn. The burnup was due to the extra load causing the inverter section to run hot as a result and setting the batteries on fire

Over the years I've heard many similar stories

UPSes are nasty, dangerous pieces of kit which must NEVER be housed alongside other equipment and ALWAYS treated like they're flammable

You're nuking futs if you put any UPS in the SAME ROOM as your other IT equipment, let alone in a rack with other kit - and as my experience showed - even the SAME Building is bad (The UPS was in a closet adjacent to electrical distribution for the building. The fire took out that closet, 3 other UPSes, the electrical distribution, audio switchroom and technician work area. Fire containment was cursory and inadequate, as are most designs around UPSes)

So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal'

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I think it is connected with the action of using a Hatchet, or axe, to chop down trees"

appropriate given that most of my hacking tends to be done with a soldering iron

You hack ON something to make it work in ways it wasn't designed to ex-factory. Hotrodding is hacking, as one example

Alan Brown Silver badge

"skiddies" is one option

Very few of these criminals are even clever. Just script kiddies with skid marks

Belgian cops crack down on encrypted phone network Sky ECC in 200 overnight raids as firm denies criminal ties

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: When will these people ever learn?

Mainly because even without access to the data, being able to subpoena the METADATA (which numbers contacted which other numbers and when) is sufficient to build a comprehsnive picture of the scale and detail of criminal organisations

This is why the police love finding multiple phones when they bust someone - It ties previously unconnected groups together

Microsoft settles £200,000+ claims against tech support scammers who ran global ripoff from cottage in Surrey

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And prosecution?

now they've been identified and named, small claims filings beckon - and directors are NOT immune to being named even after the company is dissolved

Death of a million papercuts beckons

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sleepy Dorking

It does have a 12 foot high statue of a giant cock at one end of the High Street

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2358754,-0.3220652,3a,15y,224.38h,91.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1si9kOxJ2aOp45CfhKe4omMg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 (safe for work)

SpaceX wants to slap Starlink internet terminals on planes, trucks, and boats – but Tesla owners need not apply

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Free realtime tracking with every dish ?

Nope, but the data isn't exactly high bandwidth and can be delivered by satellite on a low power carrier (GPS empheresis data is delievered by GPS....)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

"If someone else can provide good quality internet to hard-to-reach locations then that immediately takes Openreach off the political hook to get it done."

On the contrary.... Let me provide the example of Cranleigh in Surrey.

no broadband coverage, no BT plans to ever provide it - until a WISP got funding to provide it

2 weeks before the WISP go-live date, BT announced broadband plans for the village and launched a legal challenge which blocked the release of funding for the WISP (money only available because BT weren't interested). As soon as the WISP went bankrupt they dropped the urgency of the plans and finally put broadband in place 6 years later.

10 years later. there is STILL rotten coverage in the village, in areas the WISP would have covered , but BT have fullfilled their obligation of providing _A_ VDSL cabinet, which prevents anyone else getting broadband funding (locals have been ingenious in making their own micro WISPs to provide linking to people in dead spots)

Starlink is competition that BT can't put out of business and a lot of people are angry enough at their anticompetitive behaviour that they'll take any non-BT alternative simply to avoid being held over a barrel

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

"30 MBPS is still better than a speed which varied between 8MB on a good day and 0.5 MB on a bad day. "

150MB/s is better still and it doesn't dropout when the ground gets wet. 300MB/s announced for the end of 2021 and that's just using 12/14GHz - the terminals are equipped to use at least 20 different channels between 12-60GHz so there's a lot of scope for expansion

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

"But not as cheaply as competitors running fibre from an exchange on the corner."

I was quoted $5k for fibre. I have VDSL already and I'm on the edge of London in a residential area. The VDSL is suffering constant microdropouts (PPP level) and dsl dropouts in bad weather

BT's current published plans show no intention to sort the issues until 2026 or later

Starlink have already won this game for a lot of people

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hopefully

The response from openwound seems to be a big yawn so far and they're stiocking to their guns about "no problems" in the face of lots of reports of issues

Which is to be expected until C-level staff have to start explaining themselves to shareholders

You'll knw they're worried when you start seeing FUD tactics being spread

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Intelsat

Iridium's largest customer is the US military. I can see them signing up for starlink in a heartbeat

Bitter war of words erupts between UK cops and web security expert over alleged flaws in Cyberalarm monitoring tool

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: NPCC

" one of the disadvantages of the ACPO was that, as a private company, it avoided some Freedom of Information legislation."

Until it was determined that it had been delibverately setup to prevent FOI access to FOIable stuff and as such DID fall under the rules anyway

That's when it folded/phoenixed