* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Euro bureaucrats tie up .eu in red tape to stop Brexit Brits snatching back their web domains

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Small minded petty eurocracy

"It's long since become pretty clear that the principal reason for a (tiny) majority¹ Leave vote"

Bearing in mind that the _real_ reason for the media blitz in favour of brexit was the impending introduction of tax laws which would effectively make tax havens illegal and badly affect the owners of said media, along with their chums:

It was one party's infighting that triggered it, one party's infighting that ended up with the results, one party's infighting which has made the last 18 months at Westminster look like an extended Keystone Kops screening and one party's infighting which is preventing anything meaningful being done in either direction (either making it an effective brexit or scrapping the whole deal as unworkable)

The legality of the referendum campaigns is about to go before the courts, with an argument that the entire thing be annulled due to the illegal activities of certain campaign groups. Which would put Cruella DeVille in an awkward position of having called article 50 without a mandate after all.

We live in interesting times and I suspect that if things carry on as they are now, cancelling brexit won't matter much as all the important industries will have already bailed out of the UK, along with an increasing number of skilled workers - 1970s style. How long will it take before you're restricted to carrying out a maximum of £50 when leaving the country?

How long before Poles and Romanians are complaining about the influx of British economic migrants taking their jobs? Think it won't happen? Look at migration stats when the UK economy was well and truely tanked, before the EEC lifted its arse out of a sling.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Couldn't have said it better myself

"But you can't vote civil servants out"

Perhaps not, but you can certainly expose them to the white hot disinfectant of sunlight.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Flame on peeps...

"Anyway yes there are too many civil servants in the EU"

If you look a little closer you'll find that this isn't a problem confined to the EU, nor to its consitituent countries. You'll also find that the same pattern keeps playing out repeatedly (lots of pen pushers of dubious utility coming up with rules and regulations to justify their continued employment, vs a dearth of actual staff needed to actually do things that matter, like cleaning the streets, keeping the lights on, protecting the environment and investigating/dealing with corruption)

Security procedures are good – follow them and you get to keep your job

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Almost...

"some aren't very sensible"

The motorists or the speed limits?

The twats doing 60-90mph past my house at any time of day or night (30mph zone) are a good advertisement for automated and immediate enforcement systems (occasionally there's a messy crash, or pedestrian death but that doesn't discourage the speeders)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Do as I do

"They are too easily used in court as evidence that you're doing something dodgy"

Has anyone actually made that stick? Recall what's happened to Prenda Law and the other copyright trolls, along with rulings that an IP is not personal identification.

HTTPS crypto-shame: TV Licensing website pulled offline

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I've emailed them again pointing out the risks and await a response."

No need for that. Just let the ICO know - and when they don't bother responding, make the media aware.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Airline / Travel HTTP Crimes

"That can even just be a random 3rd-Party site (again over HTTP only)"

Any of this is grounds for a complaint to the ICO and making sure that El Reg (amongst others) has enough detail to make it impossible for the airlines to brush off or the government numpties to sweep under the carpet.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Well, if you're not using HTTPS, you wouldn't be aware of it, almost by design."

It would be "very good" if the ICO (or the EU privacy oversight watchdogs) declare that it's a prima facie data breach to use http for ANY kind of entry of personal data, regardless of provable data breach - and if there is a subsequent data breach then failure to use https adds a multiplier to the fines.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: scrap tv licence

"scrap tv licence

Simplest answer"

Yes, but not for the reasons you're pushing.

Radio licensing was scrapped in the late 1960s for the simple reason that with the advent of transistorisation there were too many radio sets to keep track of and the licensing income wasn't worth the hassle. TV licensing was kept because TV sets were large, cumbersome and easy to track.

Times and technology have changed and now TV sets are as ubiquitous as radio sets were at the time their licenses were scrapped.

The assumption since the 1970s has been that "every house has a TV set and every one without a license is a dodger" - with "TV detector vans" mainly being minibusses and the "detectors" being people looking for aerials or the telltale signs of a TV in use (flickering lights and the warbling sounds of coronation street coming from premises which supposedly had no TV)

You'll notice that receiver licensing is no longer a radio regulatory job: that should give a big hint as to its actual necessity.

Alan Brown Silver badge

>> "I presume the BBC is responsible for the infrastructure?"

> Why would they be?

Because TV Licensing _limited_ - the privately owned company which is responsible for actually collecting TV licence fees - is a wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC which then contracts operations out to Crapita and IBM.

It's a nice incestuous little circle jerk when you start digging into it.

A basement of broken kit, zero budget – now get the team running

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Seems he had got conned sometime around 1975, signed a spares contract, and had a large store room full of replacements; enough for about another 200 years of this power hungry crap."

I've run into that kind of shit before.

The solution is to add up the power costs, demonstrate that it's cheaper to dump the contents of the store room and jettison the numpty manager, then make higher ups aware of the situation.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I had a sort of similar experience

", and I needed to explain myself or I would be fired on the spot."

I would have responded with "I can do with the six-figure unjustified dismissal finding and the very public bollocking you'll get in employment court."

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: HMSO

"Ended up spending the rest of both shifts watching TV"

Which is as it should be. With the grunt work out of the way you're now free to deal with what comes up. IF it comes up.

Probably for the best: Apple makes sure eSIMs won't nuke the operators

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: From that 2003 article

"In order to cover a city, you need a million sites; we actually did an analysis of that. And every one of them has got to have backhaul. So it turns out it's neither economical nor practical. "

The same applies to mobile cells at the kinds of densities 5G envisages. The difference being that cellular systems have more frequencies available than Wifi and the built-in ability to turn down the transmitter power to a gnat's fart or less instead of blasting out at 100mW regardless of link strength.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I can see some of the US networks

"Then AFAIK, one US network charges $80 to unlock the phone at the end of the contract."

So did several UK networks - until that was declared illegal by the regulator

The difference being that the regulators actually have some cojones in Europe

Russia: The hole in the ISS Soyuz lifeboat – was it the crew wot dunnit?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Zero G

"it's the amount of mass which matters."

Not the moment of intertia?

You'll never guess what you can do once you steal a laptop, reflash the BIOS, and reboot it

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Surely a $5 wrench?"

Rubber hoses leave fewer marks.

We've found another problem with IPv6: It's sparked a punch-up between top networks

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

"6) VLANs and subnetting in IPv4 are easier, as you often assign a subnet to a VLAN for easier management. In IPv6 everything becomes blurred and more complex, especially in the beginning."

Running too many machines in a single segment doesn't work terribly well. If you start approaching the same numbers as the limiits of a /24 at gigabit speeds then you're going to have trouble coping with broadcast and multicast traffic, despite IPv6 being somewhat better than IPv4 on that score.

Activists rattle tin to take UK's pr0n block to court

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What could possibly go wrong,..

[savvy kids]

The ones savvy enough to bypass the blocks aren't the one they're aiming to protect, but there's a strong smell of overreach on this, especially when the IWF and friends have claimed immunity from FOI laws on disclosing the banlist.

PPI pushers now need consent to cold-call you

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: chain of command

"Does the buck stop at the PPI company, who (unlikely but possible) might not know how the leads are being brought in?"

IIRC the ICO has gone after a bunch of PPI companies who were buying leads from the spammers.

*Checks* Yup. Section 21 of the PECR has language which can catch the hirer ("Instigate or make calls") as well as the caller and the ICO has gone after the hirers on a few occasions.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 0845

"i used to have an 0845 number that I would give out to any non friend / family member."

I have a 070 number (£1.50/min) that I still have and use for the same purpose. It gets a few scam calls and it's quite easy to get them to stay on the line for 20+ minutes.

I don't get any revenue, but the telco I get it from makes sure they collect.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"make the company who hires them responsible for their actions."

THIS, in spades. Joint and several liability, per call statutory damages, multipliers for willful violations (as in, breaching the DNC lists) and the right of private action is the key to stopping the illegal calls.

A company hiring a spammy marketer will shrug and move onto the next one if the spammer goes under. If the spammer's activities have a direct impact on the bottom line, they won't do it again.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"IME an increasing number of hospital departments have a departmental mobile due to an increasing number of patients not accepting callers who withhold their numbers"

It's a _legal requirement_ in the UK that outbound callers on a PABX be able to uncloak their numbers if caller-ID is suppressed by default. A lot of outfits don't comply, but complaints to Ofcom are worthwhile.

For the most part all you need to do is tell the doctor surgery, etc to add 1470 before your number - and hope they add it to the phone number in the system.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's a start

> I've found that a few minutes spent filling in your details on their website will spare you from a boxful of nasty threatening letters.

Or not. I've been getting them for the best part of 20 years despite having a valid license the entire period.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Administration is frustrating

> You can be disqualified from being a company director, but only briefly for a first offence, and since you only need one person to set it up for you the assorted friends, relatives and the like can keep you going through a good few million nuisance calls.

Of course, should the law notice that the phoenix companies are being "fronted"(*), the orbital anvil delivery system tends to get locked and loaded.

(*) Dodging a ban by fronting someone else as a director is a serious criminal offence in most countries, usually with jailtime attached for all parties. The UK prosecutes and jails a few people every year for this and tipping off Companies House about this is always worthwhile.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If anyone

> the ICO has in the past been clueless enough to believe them.

As I understand it, the ICO staff concerned got educated with a fairly hefty cluebat.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If anyone

"I do have one 'confirmed kill' though: a solar company in Orange County. I got the Better Business Bureau involved"

The apology letter was them being thankful they'd dodged a $1500 bullet of small claims action under TCPA and the PACER record to go with it.

($500 violation, tripled by being wilful as you're on a DNC list - and notifying the FCC would put them in the firing line for $11,500 PER CALL fines - the TCPA dumps the liability jointly and severally on the caller AND the hiring company.)

BBB's are a uniquely american thing and they have little to no traction on a wilfully rogue player.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If anyone

"Yeah, fully agree, especially when most of the calls originate offshore (even if they do spoof a local number)."

Worse, they tend to spoof valid and assigned local numbers. At least one I checked on belonged to a Manchester dentist who was wondering why they were getting hate calls.

However when it comes to PPI and injury claims, the money traces back onshore.

More tellingly than all this other stuff, the thing which stopped cold calling almost dead in the USA's 1995 Telephone Consumer Protection Act was defining statutory per-call damages (to prevent what's happened here, where damages claims have been thrown out as unprovable) AND explicitly allowing a right of private action in small claims courts against the caller AND the company that hired them, with triple damages for wilful violations (caller-id spoofing/blocking, or calling anyone on a Do not call list)

It's easy enough to fly under the ICO/Ofcom's radar or evade them when targetted, but the death of 1,000,000 papercuts is much harder to dodge.

Naysayers have claimed this would paralyse the small claims system entirely - if that's really the case then the problem is so bad that SOCA should be looking into the scale of calls and telco collusion(*) as a matter of urgency.

(*)Telcos make money from terminating these calls. It's not in their financial interest to block them(**)

(**) Unless the call routing information is forged, which only tends to happen on the outright scam calls.

A boss pinching pennies may have cost his firm many, many pounds

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Developer PC

"When all the terminals were in use a 100-line Pascal programme could take 30 minutes to compile."

Those old systems could be made to effectively stop with a nested for loop printing asc(N) on one terminal.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Imagine...

> No switches... because 'manglement' decided "we don't need those"...

Imagine all that on 10Mb/s HUBS - because manglement decided - after being told in no uncertain terms that they had to sort it 2 days into the first term where noone could do anything - that switches were too expensive and it's only a student network.

Cue the entire thing going titsup when 36 students startup office simultaneously (and multiply by N classrooms all doing much the same thing at the same time).

Now connect that into the admin network (also hubbed) with no isolation between student and staff systems.

A flash of inspiration sees techie get dirty to fix hospital's woes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Noisy phone lines in building

"The hut was without phones and PCs for a couple of weeks whilst everyone scrabbled around for more budget to purchase a switch and fibre GBIC for it..."

It must've been more than a couple of years, given that 1GB/s SFP GBICs run about $5 each and switches to plug them into about $60 - and have been around that figure for a decade.

What's AI good for? Industrial or consumer tech? Meh. Airliners? AHA, says UK.gov

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Small point

"Ice can form inside the fuel tanks"

Generally as a result of insufficient quality control. Although in that particular case it built up as slush at low temperatures and ended up dumped onto the heat exchanger plate when there was a fuel demand during the landing process.

Running the engines up at the top of the descent might have avoided that being problematic(*), as would changes to tankage practices (fuel is constantly being moved about between tanks to alter trim and CG) to avoid slush buildups occuring.

(*) The problem wasn't that the engines became uncharacteristically slow to spool up/almost flamed out so much as the aircraft was close to the ground when it happened, with no safety margin for recovery.

Activists raise alarm over insidious creep of surveillance in the UK

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "With the rise of the far right,"

"Criticism of the Israeli government and/or support for the people of Palestine is not Anti-Semitism"

But apparently comparing the ghettoising and villification tactics(*) used by the Israeli government against Palestinians to similar tactics used by a certain european government against a certain etho-religious group during the late 1930s _is_ - and that's the contentious part that's somehow been slipped into the "International definition of Antisemitism".

(*) If the methods walk like a duck and quack like a duck....

Make BGP great again, er, no, for the first time: NIST backs internet route security brainwave

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: As an aside

>>Their router, their security << but who ends up taking the hit?

This is why you make sure you've documented that they've been warned and acknowledged receipt of the warning.

That way if the splash zone includes you, you have an audit trail - and if it gets messy, passing that information to their public liability insurers can result in an interesting wakeup call.

Failure to mitigate this kind of threat would invalidate most liability insurance in the event of the ISP being hacked and facing civil litigation from aggrieved customers - it's usually liabliity insurers footing the bill when companies end up defending civil cases like this.

There are ways of naming/shaming the ISP in forums where they'll get a good hard kicking without compromising your anonymity.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"good chaps"

"The ancient protocol was written with the “good chaps theory” as one of its fundamental assumptions "

Which was a proven fallacy even then.

At least one set of naval war games in the late 1970s/early 1980s ended within hours after Red team accessed Blue team's systems, downloading all their plans and intercepting orders, etc. They paralysed Blue team's deployment ability and "killed" them where they sat, in several cases by causing "self detontations" of Blue equipment without a Red team member in sight.

Blue team cried "foul" and tried to have this kind of thing banned, but it marked when the US military became interested in cyber warfare.

Academics getting onto DARPAnet brought a lot of that blind trust back, but those in the know were preaching security from the outset.

Premera Blue Cross hacker victims claim insurer trashed server to hide data-slurp clues

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Am I missing something?

"He probably did, but some C or D level PHB knew better and had it quietly EOL'd on the sly"

If that really was the case, then Enron springs to mind - the penalties for the original crimes were pretty small. What got people actual prison sentences was deliberate destruction of evidence (and ordering same)

UK.gov: NHS should be compensated by firms using its data goldmine

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: NHS data supposed to be confidential

"They don't care, no MP or rich donor uses the NHS anyway"

Actual quote:

"Do you think the NHS would be in that state if our children were using it?"

Never mind that in the UK, private hospitals/practitioners which fuck things up or end up out of their depth dump the results on the NHS as emergency cases.

Banning _that_ particular scam(*) would probably be a wakeup call for $RICH_BASTARDS when they found their private medical costs rising to USA levels.

(*) Privating the profits, socialising the costs.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: NHS data supposed to be confidential

"The data was collected with the promise that it was confidential"

Yes, and if the ICO doesn't have the balls to step up to the plate, then going straight to the EU privacy Commissioner(*) for an egrarious breach by the government seems to be the correct course of action

(*) Due to the government having undue control over the national privacy commissioner.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How about...

"What is the NHS getting out of it, not what benefit is there for the patients."

NHS: Nothing,

Patient benefit: probably negative

Benefit to mates of politicians running companies: High.

Backhanders/brown envelopes: Probably

Hundred-million Kiwi Oracle project on hold after Deloitte review

Alan Brown Silver badge

Prebb's book.

I was there for the tail end of that one.

The software was indeed good and thirty-seven million was probably an underestimate(+), but it was a little like making sausages: what comes out has hardly any resemblence to what went in.

(+) That was mostly spent before NZ's currency took a massive nosedive and would be equivalent to USD250million now.

As with the DHBs, the software suffered every manager and his dog piling hundreds of conflicting demands into the spec _after_ purchase (shifting goalposts) forcing continual rewrites.

I'm not privy to the DHB stuff(*) but in the case of the Post Office even this wasn't where most of the money went - the vast majority was soaked up in exorbitant consultant fees(**) and managerial international trips - where the manager concerned would take his family along (all flying first class) and spend a couple of weeks of that trip at various 5-star mediterannean resorts far from the software houses - all paid for by the Post Office (at that point, meaning "at taxpayer expense")

A transparency activist recently described NZ as "Having a perception of innocence, whilst actually being a nasty banana republic without the bananas" and many in the know have been calling it "The Banana Dominion" for decades.

WRT bringing in external consultants: Nice idea, but the first thing that happens is that foreigners (or long-term returning expats) who who might show up the locals are ostracised (whilst those who play the game are loved) and anyone who dares point out the emperor has no clothes usually ends up tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail - anyone considering moving to NZ should spend time looking at http://e2nz.org/ and the "migrants tales" sections in particular.

(*) The DHB I was dealing with in the last 1990s early 2000s was running their entire financial system on Excel - yes seriously, including a number of hospitals. These was an outfit handling budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, paying managers enormous figures whilst at the same time saying there was no money to replace creaking hardware (including a server room in the main hospital with a leaking roof and failing aircon)

(**) It shouldn't come as a surprise that the consultants were either close friends of senior management or were ex-management, being paid around 10 times what you'd expect as consulting fees. The building where all this was centred on in Wellington was known to most in the Post Office communications section as "Bullshit Castle" due to the antics going on inside.

Cock-ups, rather than conspiracies, top self-reported data breaches

Alan Brown Silver badge

"a copy of his resignation with apparently the damning evidence is in the hands of a solicitor. "

Which means that not only the ICO would have fun, but the company will find that its liability insurers can (and WILL) wash their hands of the whole damned mess and the main insurer may cite fraudulent misrepresentation as a reason for dropping them as a customer.

You don't need to get regulators involved to fuck up companies (and executives) that put their necks on the block like this. A quiet word to the insurers can be far more effective,

Roskosmos admits that Soyuz 'meteorite' hole had more earthly origins

Alan Brown Silver badge

Makes me wonder

What would happen if a similar hole was drilled in the Bigelow module

Archive.org's Wayback Machine is legit legal evidence, US appeals court judges rule

Alan Brown Silver badge

DNA and ffingerprints

They're both great tools for proving someone is NOT the perpetrator (ie an elimination tool)

Unfortunately when it comes to proving someone IS the perpetrator, it's a lot harder, as they've both historically relied on too few nexus points for fully accurate matching - but have then been oversold by prosecutors.as being "totally accurate"

Strewth! Aussie ISP gets eye-watering IPv4 bill, shifts to IPv6 addresses

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Has anyone truly made the switch?

"As the questions says, has anyone made the switch fully and turned off the IPv4,"

No, because it's not time yet. IPv4 is sunsetted, not deprecated.

The knee point - when it happens - will be like most transitions - hard to pick, but once passed the changeover will be fairly quick (my pick is somewhere between 18 months to 2 years for IPv6 to move from 40% to 90% of connectivity and traffic)

Dual-stack machines on native IPv6 connections attempt to use their IPv6 connections first, so for the most part endusers won't notice the changeover. IPv4-only devices in local lans will continue to function and interoperate with dual-stack devices, but they'll find their external horizons starting to shrink rapidly.

As for fax machines: Yes, we still have one. That doesn't mean it's switched on anymore.

Anon man suing Google wants crim conviction to be forgotten

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Google

"they see it as their moral duty to pay as little tax as possible and act accordingly."

Morality has nothing to do with it.

It's their LEGAL duty to pay as little tax as possible - part of the "maximising value for the shareholders" directive.

Companies don't have morality and "corporate personhood" is somewhat of a sick joke when the identity, awareness level and memory is more akin to an amoeba than anything else.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Right to be forgotten

"For someone over here, convictions, court records, etc. are all public record and available from the courthouse."

The issue isn't the fact that they're available from the courthouse (or the newspaper), it's the fact that Google (or other search engines) are indexing the things and making it easy to find them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Right to be forgotten

"The legal system may very well judge spent convictions to be rehabilitation, but society obviously does not, or so many convicts wouldn't be asking the court to further conceal the evidence of their crimes."

There's a reason for that.

Someone I know has 2 convictions for fraud, gained 25 years ago (writing stolen cheques and bogus insurance claims). He's been trying to get those expunged recently, claiming those were the result of a misspent youth.

The problem is that in the intervening 25 years, he's been caught making forgeries trying to hijack people's domain names, attempted postal fraud, illegal lotteries and a bunch of other dodgy shit - and in all cases either the victims have decided they really don't want to go through the expense and hassle of suing him or the police have decided he's not worth prosecuting (for the postal fraud, the local postmaster has it sitting on file, for evidence if it ever happens again - there's no statute of limitations on that one)

Officially, NONE of this other stuff counts. Only the convictions do. What it actually means at a practical is that another prosecution is necessary - simply to prevent him burying his past in order to be able to ramp up his ongoing activities - vs being able to point people to the convictions and a few people he's crossed paths with.

On the other hand there are convicts who have exemplary records since that point - and my experience is that they're the kind of people who usually don't try to conceal the information.

Google cracks down on dodgy tech support ads

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I call BULLSH*T!

" that linked to a bogus "Antivirus/Cleaner" app on the Google Play Store."

This is El Reg. Name that fucker.

Trainer regrets giving straight answer to staffer's odd question

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lightening strike ?

"a nearby lightening strike turned it into a brick. I was intrigued that the tech support team were quite familiar with this ...."

I'm not overly surprised. Lightning strike surges have a tendency to come in via your (ungrounded, barely protected) phone line and wreak havoc whilst finding their way to a solid earth point.

A lightning strike isn't "one" zap. Surge arresters tend to blow out on the first one, go open circuit and then fail to protect the equipment on the following 2-3 associated with each strike. (Decent phone line surge arresters go SHORT circuit and stay that way). Of course when you arrive at a telco hut and find smoking wire ends where your line cards used to be and a pile of charred material on the floor, then there's not a lot you can do.

$HINT1: Unplug your phone line if you have any substantial length of phone line between you and the DSL/exchange point.

$HINT2: Cloud to cloud strikes are generally worse for causing damage than cloud to ground strikes as they cause equal but opposite current flows in the earth.

$HINT3: The strike that blows your line can be a few miles away.

$HINT4: Nothing's going to protect you if you get a direct hit, or even a near miss.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"We had a secretary spill her hot chocolate over her Apple keyboard "

I had a journalist do something similar with a Reuters keyboard back when those terminals were hideously expensive. It was only after dunking it in a bucket of water that I discovered that under the keystems they had a block of literal foam (about 1/2" thick) with an aluminium foil disc stuck to the bottom. Reuters clearly know how hamhanded the users were.

It was good as gold after it dried out (better, according to the users - probably because I scrubbed the PCB down with hot soapy water to get rid of years of nicotine buildup), but that foam took an age to dry out.