* Posts by Number6

2293 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

It's not just you: Massive Comcast outage blows Bay Area offline

Number6

I didn't notice an outage, it was certainly working at 11pm Tuesday night and 6am Wednesday morning because I stream BBC radio at those times. Perhaps they missed us.

Adblock Plus blocked from attending ad industry talkfest

Number6

Quote apart from the fact that the sort of ads being pushed (flashy, distracting and all that) are the sort that put me off doing business with the company so advertised, I would want the advertising industry to guarantee the safety and security of all adverts served up and compensate people for losses incurred when malware gets into the system, all without the need for expensive litigation. If they're not prepared to cover my losses, I'm not prepared to risk letting their dodgy scripts have access to my system.

Late night server rebuild led to 'nightmares about mutilated corpses'

Number6

Re: Delete unused files?

It makes you wonder about the de-duplication technology. Sometimes having made a temporary copy last week is the one thing that saves the day when everything else goes wrong. If it was de-duplicated then trashing those sectors on the physical media would take out all copies.

Or is that not how it works?

Evil OpenSSH servers can steal your private login keys to other systems – patch now

Number6

Re: My workaround...

I assume you use double-ROT13 encryption as well?

Beware the terrorist drones! For they are coming! Pass new laws!

Number6

Re: GPS Blanking

The GPS restrictions on altitude and speed are meaningless outside the US sphere of influence. All that happens if you've got a GPS that ignores them is that the US consider it to be a munition and try to stick all sorts of export restrictions on it. I very much doubt if the Chinese are worried about that, but it might cause pain if you try to export such a device from some countries.

Number6

GPS Blanking

So you take the drone controller and drive it around to see which areas it doesn't like, thus building up a map of places the government doesn't want you to access. OK, there's a bit of work needed to compile the list but it's a bit like giving the terrorists a cheat sheet. This also assumes it's not just simpler to extract the list from the device firmware.

I agree with Lysenko - most current mass-market drones have very poor performance and anyone wanting to cause serious harm with one is likely to have something custom that avoids all the legal restrictions.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

Number6

Security

Given that malware can be distributed by dodgy ad server scripts, the reputable side of things could clean up their act and come up with a solution that did not use scripts. It can't be that hard to do it all server side, it would just put all the processor load on the ad server but would mean that NoScript and its ilk wouldn't filter things out. At the moment I have full-on ad and script blocking by default because otherwise my system has a security hole. Make your product safe and I might consider using it.

YouTube puts T-Mobile US on naughty list for throttling all vids to 480p

Number6

My tablet is wifi-only, As for screen resolution, I'd have to go look up the maths, but it's all tied up with the smallest angle the eye can resolve so I'm not sure 1080p on a tablet would be worth the effort. 720p might be though.

Number6

If I wanted to watch a video of any great duration then I'd want it on something bigger than a phone screen. I'm not sure I could tell the difference between 480p and 1080p on my phone given my eyesight, even if the phone supports the higher resolution.

There's an epidemic of idiots who can't find power switches

Number6

Re: Image @ John Savard

Yes, got a few of those. When I first saw one I was all "30A through that? Really?"

You might guess I was unimpressed with the construction and general flimsy feel, given the high-current stuff I was used to from the UK.

Number6

Re: Image @ John Savard

The UK power plug/socket is the safest system in the world with the shutters and tolerances to make sure the bits that bite are safely connected. To my way of thinking the US socket is upside down because if you've got a plug that is not completely inserted and you drop something conductive that slips between the plug and socket, it can land on the live terminal. If the socket was the other way up, it would hit the earth pin first.

Number6

Various embarrassing experiences in my early career mean that "is it plugged in?", "is it switched on?", "Do I have volts on the power source?" are automatic checks for me now, having spent time trying to diagnose faults while missing the bleeding obvious. If I'm working on it and expect it to be powered off then the power cord is either in my lap or at least in a highly visible place so I know it's not still live.

Australian government urges holidaymakers to kill two-factor auth

Number6

Sounds like the Aussies need a bit of two-finger auth to express their opinion to the Oz government.

Chicago cops under fire for astonishingly high dashcam, mic failures

Number6

A good start is for the courts to rule against the police in any case where the police fail to produce corroborating evidence for their claim due to a failed body cam. Perhaps reliability would improve amazingly with that simple fix.

USA doubles visa fees for migrant IT workers

Number6

Unlikely to be that much for a company that specialises in them. Either they've hired their own lawyer to do it, or they've got other in-house staff who know how to do it. US visas can be done by normal people without needing to consult a lawyer, once you've figured out what sort of answer each question wants.

GOP senators push FCC to kill support for local broadband

Number6

Re: verbatim, from ATT...

That's how it is in a lot of places, crappy low-speed DSL even if your line supports more. At least if Comcast is in the area there's an option for higher speeds, and when it's working there's nothing wrong with it (except the price). Perhaps the municipal broadband ought to work like Openreach with independent ISPs - here's the infrastructure, pay us to get access to it and offer services to your customers.

Doctor Who: Oh, look! There's a restaurant at the end of the universe in Hell Bent

Number6

Re: Could we do a poll...

I joined with the third doctor, gave up shortly after Colin Baker took over, then picked up again somewhere with Tennant.

Part of the problem is that it's harder now, the Doctor has been to most of the important events in the Universe and on Earth, so the writers have to get more imaginative (although I did like the Doctor's instruction to President Nixon about recording everything...)

I think the multi-part stories were an improvement, less of the trivial and a bit more chance for character and plot development. I thought Capaldi was suffering from poor scripts when he first took over, a bit like what happened to Peter Davison, but he's shown how good he can be. I don't think Moffat is as good as Davies but he's produced some good stuff along with a sprinkling of dross.

Sysadmin's £100,000 revenge after sudden sacking

Number6

Re: Late to the thread, but with an idea...

There's a time limit on there. I think if you make someone redundant then you're not allowed to hire for that position for six months, although I might be well out of date on that. Asking if he knew why the phone bill was so high isn't really anything to do with the supposed redundancy of the job, that just shows a degree of incompetence and lack of proper records in some departments.

Number6

Re: ISDN

I got kicked off the Freeserve unmetered internet because a machine on my network kept trying to phone home and kept the link up enough that they got upset. Fortunately Demon started theirs about that time so I just switched. It did spend an awful lot of its time on-line, almost as good as (and much cheaper than) a leased line, and the near-zero link set-up time after the 56k modem made it quite good. I still have the ISDN modem and the spare somewhere around.

Unsourced, unreliable, and in your face forever: Wikidata, the future of online nonsense

Number6

A purpose for WikiData

Provided we can maintain an accurate record of reality elsewhere, WikiData would allow people to compare reality with what large corporations and governments would like to be the truth. The hard part would be educating those who would believe it simply because it was on the internet and therefore must be true.

Number6

Re: So, Wikidata is Wikipedia's bastard child ?

Progress is a vector. Magnitude and direction.

Windows 10 lags 7, 8 … and even Vista in the channel race

Number6

Pre-installed != Activated

The last three laptops I bought came with Windows 8.1 (x2) and Windows 10, but in each case they were never activated, all three having Linux installed instead. So even the pre-installation numbers may be an overestimate of the total in use.

Brit hardware hacker turns Raspberry Pi Zeros into selfie slayers

Number6

Been Done

Didn't some US hotel get on the wrong side of the FCC for pretty much doing this? They were sending deauth packets to anything trying to use a mobile hotspot in the hotel in an attempt to encourage everyone to pay to use the hotel WiFi instead. All this guy has done is slimmed it down and made it more selective about what it attacks.

Cisco plugs WebEx for Android bug

Number6

Enough with the permission grab

I've given up on installing apps on my phone because of the excessive permissions demanded. If my company want me to do Webex on a mobile they can provide the mobile. They already handle incoming calls by allocating a VoIP extension that can be diverted to your mobile. I don't have one of those either and actually, I find life a lot easier without phone calls - email only, which I can deal with when I've got time.

VPN users menaced by port forwarding blunder

Number6

The obvious fix for this is that the VPN endpoint IP address should only be used for connecting to the VPN service. Anyone who wants a port-forward needs to have it attached to a different machine/IP to avoid bypassing the tunnel.

Doctor Who: Even the TARDIS key can't unpick the chronolock in Face the Raven

Number6

Now he's been given some good scripts and stories to work with he's doing quite well. Ecclestone and Tennant had all memory of the War Doctor activities repressed but Capaldi's incarnation is fully aware of what he is capable of if he lets himself do it. What we see is that internal struggle of someone trying not to take life and to save it where possible despite him and his friends being attacked and threatened.

Doctor Who: The Hybrid finally reveals itself in the epic Heaven Sent

Number6

Re: The Hybrid is Ashildr

She was featured in the "next week" clip at the end so I'd expect her to be in the credits for it.

Number6

Re: Finally it starts to come together.

The only clues that got left each time were the word "bird" in the sand and the skull with the electrodes on it, plus the shovel. The blood streaks got cleared up each time, they were shown disappearing as it reset the first time.

Ex-IT staff claim Disney fired them then gave their jobs H-1B peeps

Number6

Re: H-1B nonsense

If it's a "legit" H1-B and the first company is prepared to let you work notice while the 2nd gets the paperwork done it's probably possible.

I'd say the way it probably works is that you talk to company 2 and agree to go work for them when the H1B approval comes through and when it does, you drop a letter on the HR desk of company 1 on the way out. I don't know if you need anything from company 1 to facilitate the transfer of an H1B, not having had to do it personally, I could be talking bollocks.

It depends on the job level, but places I've seen ask you to give them two weeks' notice if you're quitting, and I've seen that work OK with H1B people too. Perhaps I've just been lucky with my choice of employers.

Number6

Re: H-1B nonsense

I know people who've changed jobs while on an H1B. I suspect there's pragmatism in there from the immigration people - provided the application is in, either they give you an extension while they process the application or it takes less than 30 days.

Number6

Re: H-1B nonsense

That's not true, an H1B is transferable once you've got it. The L1 internal company transfer is the real slave labour potential, it is flexible in that it allows you to work in the US with less hoops to jump through than an H1B, but it is not transferable - get fired and get out.

The catch for an H1B is that the employees probably signed a bit of paper promising to pay back exorbitant fees to the sponsoring company if they quit too soon. At some level this is OK - if a company invests money in you it wants something back if you leave before it gets a return on that investment, but that assumes everything else is reasonable about the deal.

Suck it, Elon – Jeff Bezos' New Shepard space rocket blasts off, lands in one piece

Number6

Humbug

Thunderbird 3 was doing that back in the 1960s.

Still impressive though.

Cat discovers GNOME desktop bug

Number6

Well behaved cats

The cats around here are pretty well behaved. One is sleeping on the desk, another on the floor the other side of the desk and the third is not in her usual chair. They don't wake me up at stupid o'clock for food (I leave dry food down at all times and feed them tinned food once a day when I get in from work) and the one that likes to sleep on the bed seems to manage to remain there comatose from before I go to sleep until after I wake up. I will gloss over the furballs, mainly because if I'm not quick enough, the dog cleans those up.

I do lock the keyboard when away from the PC though, I don't trust them that far, and they don't appear to have cracked the password yet.

Hillary Clinton: Stop helping terrorists, Silicon Valley – weaken your encryption

Number6

Perhaps if the US (and other governments) would stop pursuing policies that encourage the rise of terrorism in the first place...

Big Bang left us with a perfect random number generator

Number6

Passing of Random Data

I'm still inspired by the scientist who would regularly send himself large blocks of random data over the internet. If enough of us shared email addresses and swapped random blocks it would play havoc with the spooks trying to look for interesting stuff. Not quite sure how you'd handle being asked for the decryption keys, although if you had an electronic copy of War and Peace, you could generate a key on the fly by xoring it with the random data.

Voting machine memory stick drama in Georgia sparks scandal, probe

Number6

You can't have a recount if a box is missing, or you believe that its contents have been tampered with.

Number6

It should not be possible to lose a ballot box. The system should know they've been sent out, and should count them all back in again, checking serial numbers and seals. If one is missing then it should be obvious. About the only hole in this process is if an outgoing box is successfully substituted on its way to the polling station and the serial number not checked. Then you can lose the fake and substitute the original one full of dodgy papers on the way back. Even that's not foolproof in the UK because ballots are identifiable at this stage and a spot check of serial numbers can be made, a few at random per box, as well as the number of ballots in the box. You'd need a fairly big operation to successfully subvert enough people to the cause to get a dodgy box into the system undetected.

Of course, having established that a problem exists, what to do about it? If the result is close enough that the contents of a missing or suspicious box could affect the outcome then the only proper thing to do is declare the election void and hold it again.

Number6

The mere fact that someone found a memory stick and it wasn't possible to immediately account for which one it was, where it was used and that the results it contained had been positively logged into the system does suggest that they're a bit slack.

Number6

Transparency

It may well have been fair, but it is also important that it is seen to be fair and that allegations are properly investigated. A piece of paper with an X on it does have its attractions over all this electronic jiggery-pokery, especially as it's very hard to independently audit the machines.

Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?

Number6

I still have an OS/2 VM, it's been cloned to new machines a few times but still goes back to the original disk image running on bare metal all those years ago. Apart from the fact that I've forgotten the LAN password and can't figure out how to reset it, it copes with its primary job even if it's less than trivial to get files on and off of it.

Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant

Number6

Can't fault him this time

Sometimes I think he's overreacting, but looking at those code examples, I agree with him 100% on this issue.

Why was the modem down? Let us count the ways. And phone lines

Number6

To be fair to the financial guy, at least he figured it out himself at the end. I'm sure we've all done something that daft at least once.

Top cops demand access to the UK's entire web browsing history

Number6

That's not too hard, you don't even need a browser - on Linux you use wget and a script. Malware doesn't work if it's never executed and is instead just piped to /dev/null.

Number6

So which logs are they after? Those collected by a website or are they expecting ISPs to log all of this? It's going to de damned difficult to track an individual by asking loads of websites if they've seen the IP address, especially if it's a dynamic one.

One way to screw the proposal would be if lots of websites had one-pixel GIF images and they all referenced all the others by suitable means on web pages. Ideally this would be done with a blank referer field, but imagine if you could click on an Amazon or Microsoft page (or even one from El Reg) and simply by doing so, you'd be logged as accessing a hundred other sites. It would make any sort of correlation useless by poisoning the logs. Obviously there are a few performance issues, but we should be looking at ways of making the collected data useless.

We suck? No, James Dyson. It is you who suck – Bosch and Siemens

Number6

Robot Vacs

The robot vacuums are tested comparatively by magazines and in test standards by dumping a known weight of dirt into a test area and checking to see how much of it gets picked up during a cleaning cycle. That ought to be a standard test, regardless of suction power. Suck as much as you like provided you get all the dust up.

European Parliament votes to grant Snowden protection from US

Number6

Popcorn

I can see hours of entertainment from this one as various personages get excitable and throw teddies from prams.

Online daters swindled out of £33m last year – police

Number6

I dated a woman I met off the internet. It's cost me thousands, but I guess it's my own fault because I married her. Worth every penny though...

Bacon can kill: Official

Number6

Proposition 65

Does this mean if I buy bacon in California it will now come with that stupid little notice attached about being known to the State of California to cause cancer?

Not that the bacon over here is anywhere near the quality of good British back bacon. The easy-to-get stuff here is full of fat.

California enormo-quake prediction: Cracks form between US boffins

Number6

Re: @jake (was:Forget the San Andreas...)

I wasn't talking about the San Andreas, I was looking further north for the big quake and tsunami.

I think the Hayward Fault is building up to something in the near future (noting that 'near' in geological terms is a bit imprecise). San Ramon just had a quake swarm, and the Hayward itself has had a couple of little warm-up events. With the Napa quake relieving a bit of stress in the system to the north, it's got to be pretty tense down around the East Bay geology.

American robocallers to be shamed in public lists

Number6

Re: Easy Parsing Please

Oh look, downvoted by someone in the robo-calling industry...