* Posts by Peter2

2941 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Tech team trapped in data centre as hypoxic gas flooded in. Again

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Hasn't halon been banned or something in the '90s?

No probs. Kind of easy to assume the stuff is lethal given that the BOFH uses it as a mass murder weapon!

Kudo's for checking and realising (and admitting) you were wrong as well. Increasingly rare these days, unfortunately :)

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Hasn't halon been banned or something in the '90s?

You can't breath any [Halon] (that's the point) so it's the difference between NATO 5.56 and Russian 5.45 x 39.

Actually, no. Halon does not put fires out by displacing oxygen. It has some kind of funky chemical reaction which reduces the heat from the fire, which puts it out. IIRC, you can breathe the stuff for (IIRC) something like 15 minutes before you start getting a headache from it.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Hasn't halon been banned or something in the '90s?

Like a CO2 flood, which is probably more lethal?

Heatwave shmeatwave: Brit IT departments cool their racks – explicit pics

Peter2 Silver badge

With a half dozen top mounted case fans in fullsize cabinets, yeah. Bog standard arrangement.

But the article was showing pictures of those little wallmount comms cabinets which are generally mounted as close to the ceiling as the cabling contractor could get, which means you can't get access to the top. The article showed people having the same heat management problems with the comms cabinets as with larger cabinets and trying to control the temp by blowing ambient air into the hot space at the back with a normal deskfan.

My point is simply that controlling tempretures in a small cabinet is best done in exactly the same way as with a larger cabinet; kick the hot air out with a case fan or two and cooler air gets sucked in the other opening.

Peter2 Silver badge

. . .

Ok. Racks get hot because the equipment in them draws cold air from the front, and then blows hot air out of the back. As wallmount cabling cabinets are poorly designed for airflow the hot air in the back can escape in two ways, firstly through escaping out of the tiny holes drilled in the side which probably wouldn't let enough air in to keep a hampster alive, and secondly by escaping out of the front in the gaps around the mounting rails. This hot air then mostly gets sucked back in the air intakes at the front of the equipment in the rack. The rack then gets hotter and hotter until the equipment generating the heat melts.

We can all agree that's the problem? Cool.

So why in the name of $DEITY do people blow cold air into the hot aisle they've created to cool the cabinet down? It's just pushing the hot air out the front, hopefully faster than it's being pulled back in again. A more elegant solution is to pull the air out of the hot aisle so that cool air is sucked in the front and hot air goes out of the back.

A PC case fan is ideal for this, and most IT departments have at least one dead PC waiting to be properly disposed of that can part with it's case fan. Figuring out how to get 12v to it should be an exercise left to the imagination of the reader, but I shall comment that most supermarkets will sell 12v PSU's for a few quid. This combination provably lasts years running 24/7 as long as the H&S people don't see the spliced wiring connecting these two parts.

There are of course other methods such as using transformers already owned by your organisation, such as running a long cable from the 12v rail on a nearby PC, buggering the dead PC's PSU so that it'll run without anything connected, sacrificing one of those 12v transformers in that box of surplus to requirement parts saved for a rainy day, or wiring 4 (12v) fans from the (48v) output from the PoE switch which is generating most of the heat in the cabinet for Cooling Over Ethernet, but a dedicated 12v supply is by far the best option.

BT's Patterson keeps his £1.3m wheelbarrow of bonus cash after all

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: not for profit?

The best option, IMO would be to simply ensure that these sort of companies (especially companies like Nominet) are either owned by the Crown Estate, or are setup on a similar basis.

In short, for those not already aware the Crown Estate is a business with 14Billion worth of assets, but pays all of it's yearly profits (~£330million) into the bottomless pit of HM Treasury. If the public pays for things such as a fiber rollout in areas where it is not economically viable for companies to pay for it then my view is that those assets shouldn't just be gifted to BT/Openreach and should instead be held by the Crown Estate and then rented to them to recoup at least some of the cost for the taxpayer.

Peter2 Silver badge

name me one privatised industry in the UK that has benefited the people that use it or work for them?

Post WW2, there is a really long list of industries that were nationalised, many of which were making huge losses. Aircraft manufacture, Car manufacture, shipbuilding, coal mining, you name it. This continued up until the point the country was literially bankrupted by the mess and had to go to the IMF with a begging bowl.

The solution to get out of the hole was simply to privatise everything.

The idea was never really about benefiting the people using or working for the companies, it was simply to stop those entities bankrupting the country to the detriment of everybody living in the country.

BGP hijacker booted off the Internet's backbone

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Good news all round

My feeling is that most spam is done by a handful of people. If you look at the spam logs closely you can pretty much tell when the spammers take holidays and aren't "working".

For me personally, January was quite interesting. The 1st through the 14th had a relatively low tiny level of spam (<20%) The 16th-19th had a big blip of 80%, which then dropped down to ~20% again until the 28th (interestingly a Sunday, which is unusual as weekends are normally dead quiet for spam) where for the next few days up to 94.67% of emails received were spam.

Almost as if somebody took a 14 day holiday, was back for a couple of days and then went off on holiday again, followed by coming back and unleashing a tsunami of spam that bordered on being a DDOS.

I think I'm a clone now: Chinese AMD Epyc-like server chips appear in China. What gives?

Peter2 Silver badge

I'm sure HP and Dell would sell you a Ryzen box if they thought it was profitable.

I take it that you missed Intel sucessfully locking AMD out of the market when the Athlon64 and Opetron completely blew away the P4 and Xeon's of the time?

El Reg covered this quite nicely back then:-

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/26/after_the_dell_settlement/

This also summerises quite nicely.

https://mlexmarketinsight.com/insights-center/editors-picks/antitrust/europe/intel-denounces-huge-expansion-of-eus-legal-reach-in-antitrust-fine-appeal

Intel’s illegal conduct was two-fold: firstly, giving rebates to computer manufacturers — Dell, HP, NEC and Lenovo — if they bought all, or almost all, of their processors from Intel. This was also combined with direct payments to a German retailer Media Saturn Holding for stocking only Intel products.

Secondly, Intel paid HP, Acer and Lenovo to limit or delay rival AMD-equipped products and squeeze them out of sales channels, the commission found.

Personally, I doubt that the same retailers not selling anything from AMD this time around is down to the merits of the product.

Peter2 Silver badge

Hopefully AMD will make enough money from this to survive whatever Intel's next anti competitive action to keep AMD out of the market is.

Have you noticed how difficult it is to buy a ready built AMD Ryzen from the people caught doing anti competitive deals with Intel last time? You wouldn't know that Ryzen has a better price/performance point judging by the fact that Dell only do Ryzen's in their alienware range at a seriously premium price. And um, the fact that despite HP thereotically selling PC's with Ryzens in you can't actually order them from the HP.com website.

Funny that.

Cops suspect Detroit fuel station was hacked before 10 drivers made off with 2.3k 'free' litres

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Outrageous!

What about writing down the tag numbers and telling drivers they will be reported for theft? I think the attendant was either sleeping, or selling the gas for cash at a discount.

Garages have CCTV for that, as it's more useful in a court case so they ought to be able to do that anyway.

The problem was probably that the attendant a minimum wage employee, and didn't know what to do in that situation and wasn't willing to make any kind of judgement call lest he or she be fired for doing "the wrong thing" by an opressively sociopathic manager, who themselves has sod all decision making autonomy and so just enjoys lording it over their staff.

Remember that IT employees are generally given more lattitude to make these sort of decisions than many other workers can dream of. Personally, after thinking about it for about 2 minutes i'd pull the emergency stop on that row of pumps, stick up an "out of order" sign, and then force people to use the other pumps and call in manglement to figure things out. But again, that is probably more lattitude than the poor sods doing that sort of job are allowed to exercise.

DNS ad-hocracy in peril as ICANN advisors mull root server shakeup

Peter2 Silver badge

Ever since ICANN took full stewardship of various crucial internet functions – such as overseeing DNS and domain names – from the US government's Department of Commerce, it has been considering questions like: who holds root server operators accountable and to what rules;

Ever since ICANN took full stewardship of various crucial internet functions – such as overseeing DNS and domain names – from the US government's Department of Commerce, practically everybody on the internet has been wondering who the fuck holds ICANN responsible, and to what rules.

They ignore their own guidence rules and byelaws, and attempt to eliminate their ability to be held to account in court via contract.

The root servers aren't a problem at the moment. ICANN is.

Who fancies a six-core, 128GB RAM, 8TB NVMe … laptop?

Peter2 Silver badge

Dell’s started selling a pair of “mobile workstations” with specs that wouldn’t disgrace low-end servers.

My home desktop runs rings around my (now coming to the end of it's supported lifespan) server at work and this is pretty normal, home gaming machines always tend to be more powerful than lower end servers.

However, in the majority of server applications the essence of a server is not, and has never been about pure performance. It's always been about redundancy, reliability and business contuinity. It's rare to find a home computer with redundant PSU's and HDD's, whereas this is pretty obligatary on servers.

UK Home Office sheds 70 staff on delayed 4G upgrade to Emergency Services Network

Peter2 Silver badge

A fine example of a successful change strategy would be to start off every single morning by having three hand picked Whitehall mandarins tied to the track at Charing Cross, to be decapitated by the arrival of the 08:35 from Tunbridge Wells. That's the sort of effort you'd need to spark performance change in the civil service.

Wouldn't work.

Having worked in the civil service temporarily as a junior manager, i'd say the biggest thing that could be done would be to provide both carrots and sticks to the junior management, and provide training in the use of both.

I really struggled in the civil service, as you don't have a stick. It's impossible to do anything to an incompetent or just outright lazy staffer. You also don't have much in the way of carrots, as you can't hand out bonuses or pay rises for good performance. The only tools I could really use was work assignments, which I used mercilessly on people who didn't work as part of the team.

So, find some decently socipathic HR staff who outright enjoy firing dead wood staff, provide ability to give bonuses for good performance and being fired for wasting huge amounts of cash and then see what happens. That would provide the tools for effective change, but it'd take a decade or so to fix.

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Work Experience

I was lucky enough to get to do my pre-GCSE work experience week in a military facility.

Me too. I broke in every morning though, to the great chargrin of the base security. They had a massively secure gate system on a secondary entrance with impressive physical locks and electronic alarms if you forced it open, but it was unguarded and you could get your arm through the gate and unlock the gate. As it wasn't supervised, you could then turn around and lock it again, gaining entry with nobody being the wiser.

They got me to write that up, and also see if I could find any other problems with their external security. The colonel on the base actually read it and was surprisingly decent about it, I ended up getting a case of severe amnesia when talking to the teachers about "had I left the workplace agreed with the school" and in return was allowed to go and watch a military exercise for a day, albeit from a staff car which I wasn't allowed to leave to absolutely ensure that my 14 year old self couldn't possibly blow his fingers off by playing with things possibly lying around.

That'll learn ya! Data watchdog spanks two Brit phone botherers

Peter2 Silver badge

If they withhold their number, then you have to listen to the scum to find out who they are so you can then complain to the ICO. Surely in this day and age, there must be a better way of complaining?

Well, the thing is that withholding the CLI data only withholds it from the end user. It's still held by the telephone network, as they keep that for billing and anti abuse purposes so it's possible to deal with this, the network operator just can't be assed to do it.

A cynic would think that this has something to do with the fact that BT/Openreach/Whoever is quite happy to provide services to a company that makes tens or hundreds of thousands of calls because they are a "better" (paying) customer than the home user that wants them blocked.

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

Peter2 Silver badge

After a couple of days of everyone sweeping, painting, polishing etc he realised the royal family probably go their entire lives thinking the world smells of polish and new paint.

I doubt it. Prince Phillip was of course a professional Royal Navy officer before marrying the (at the time princess), and no doubt he participated in his fair share of cleaning up exercises for high ups, as one suspects Princess Elizabeth would have done during WW2 when she was serving as a mechanic.

I'm sure that they will know full well what goes on for offical visits.

UK military may recruit wheezy, alcoholic keyboard warriors

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Health problems?

Strange how the same techniques has been so much less effective, although equally widely applied, in industry

In the military they deliberately had one set of troops that just did training and then handed the trained troops over to the line regiments so the deliberately bad relationship with the training staff had a clear demarcation to the normal chaps in charge, who couldn't help but look sweetly reasonable in comparison.

In industry it's just absymal and incompetent management.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Health problems?

If OCD is a reason to keep people out, why is the Army historically obsessive about keeping tidy barracks and laying out uniform on beds 'just so', within a millimetre?

It's actually not and those training techniques are really old and obselete.

However, the idea behind doing that for the low level troops was to get people used to trying hard to do things that may well be impossible, and to foster a team spirit amongst the victims by getting them to bond together, the first part of which is everybody agreeing that the bloke is a bastard and then helping each other out to escape his wrath.

There are new methods these days, but the idea is to very rapidly impart a team spirit among the trainees along with "thou shalt not give up" which is an operational requirement for people betting their lives that somebody else is going to do their job.

Bear in mind that the army has three sets of training courses, one for the troops, one for NCO's and another for officers, each of which are aiming at acheiving different things. I suppose it's possible that they can deal with a forth for cyber operations and you can see here that there is realisation at a high level that change is required, but it's so radically different in terms of staffing requirements, required psycology and management from the rest of the forces that I think it'd be better to have a seperate organisation for it entirely.

NHS England fingered over failure to forward patient correspondence

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: outsourced the work and thought also the responsibility

The problem is that the assigned public service contract manager is probably an aspiring business type and has no clue about the service that has been outsourced, but is fully aligned with charts and metrics and powerpoint etc. They need to insource the management of those contracts to ensure they are delivering what they expect to be being delivered

Ok. In one paragraph you realise that the NHS Graduate management training scheme that streamlines arrogent and clueless university graduates into management leads to the people making decision having no clue about what the service is that's being outsourced. But you then expect the same people to manage that service effectively inhouse in the same paragraph?

Here's a thought, sack anybody not competent to do their job, or trying to evade responsibility for their fuckups. I know that the unite union would declare WW3 over dismissing civil servants, but it's not sustainable to retain some people.

NASA spots asteroid on crash course with Earth – with just hours to go

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: dont be a panicky idiot

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

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

Uber 'does not exist any more' says Turkish president

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Turkey finally steps up and does the thing right

It's not the right thing. Police action to suppress lawful activity on the basis of a campaign speech made by a politician isn't the right thing.

But Uber is doing things they aren't licensed for, and their unlicensed drivers are lawfully being fined in accordance with the letter and spirit of the law.

No sympathy from me. Uber just ignores any laws they don't feel like following and it's high time that they are taken down a few pegs.

Artificial intelligence... or advanced imitation? How DeepMind used YouTube vids to train game-beating Atari bot

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Better hope it doesn't gain sentience

No! It will look like AmanfromMars.

Your F-35s need spare bits? Computer says we'll have you sorted in... a couple of years

Peter2 Silver badge

Broadly, it appears from his comments that too many jets to servers results in the system at that location becoming noticeably slow.

Which would be fair enough if we were talking about many hundreds of jets to a single server, but I don't think they've even built that many yet. Sounds like a serious design flaw on the server side of things.

Double trouble at tape survivor Quantum as CEO and CFO quit firm

Peter2 Silver badge

CEO brought in to reduce costs.

CEO discovers that he can't greatly reduce costs.

CEO leaves because he doesn't see any acheivable way to improve the business he wants to spend more time with his family.

It's hardly a surprise though. On the plus side, tape is really excellent for off site backups and low end long term archiving by throwing a tape every month in a safe location.

On the downside it's an ass to setup if you haven't done it before (which many people haven't as they are going to the cloud for backups) and expensive to boot as you need a server that supports SCSI before you even start about thinking about buying the tape drive which puts a lot of people off.

There are only a couple of options for the tape companies. Consolidate, or just pray your the last one in the market standing to keep a smaller market.

That, or try and do something like get companies back from archive companies by doing a counterattack to get some market share back. Make a tape appliance attached to a NAS that's foolproof to deploy and do a hire purchase on it to bring the monthly cost down to around the same as online backup companies charge, and market it on being cheaper, with a faster recovery time.

Amazon can't or won't collect sales tax in Australia

Peter2 Silver badge

These days, with companies that don't pay tax i'd take the revenue and profit figures with a ton of salt.

Companies are well known for inventing an IP charge to their parent company of 99% of their actual profit, thereby reducing the total payable as the "profit" is less and Amazon is one of the companies that takes a very creative approach to honesty.

MH370 search ends – probably – without finding missing 777

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: A sad end to a terrible event

I'm not really sure why the pilot gets all the flack. He's been declared both a possible terrorist, and as a possible manic depressive mass murdering monster who wanted to take hundreds with him on an elaborate suicide attempt on the basis of owning a computer and having a flight sim installed. Oh, and randomly flying around in that flight sim, as if that's not the entire point and purpose of a flight sim.

Hands up, who has ever flown a flight sim until you've run out of fuel without worrying about landing it because it's a sim and who the fuck cares? Yeah? Me too. It's not evidence he is a murderer. Christ knows how many thousands of simulated aircraft i've ripped the wings/landing gear/etc off of over the decades.

Notably, there are three other very, very obvious factors.

1) The plane may have been defective. The vendor would be delighted to blame the pilot to continue making billions from selling their aircraft.

2) The maintance might have been substandard, in which case the operator might be quite delighted to get away with blaming the pilot to avoid fines, and all of their potential customers running away screaming.

3) The plane was carrying 5400 pounds worth of lithium batteries, from whom the shipper is not likely to admit that they broke safety rules in the way they were shipped and who would be delighted to blame... yeah, you get the picture.

Ok, imagine that on a routine flight that you have a fierce lithium fire from 5,400 pounds worth of lithium batteries that are onboard. The attendants realise and try and fight it with the onboard extinguishers, and fail as they are driven back by toxic choking smoke that spreads to the passangers.

They report this to the pilot, who realises that he has a fire burning holes through his plane and choking passangers. Come up with a solution to that in a few seconds. Deploying the oxygen masks and climbing to an altitude where that might starve the fire of oxygen sounds reasonable to me, as does turning around and heading roughly towards home.

Pilots are taught the axiom “Aviate, Navigate, Communicate” teaches pilots to fly the airplane first, then navigate, and once the situation is under control, communicate.

Pilot is focused on dealing with the situation for mere minutes, and the fire burns through something important and he loses most of the electronics. He doesn't get a chance to communicate via radio before it stops working, everybody suffocates (or passanger oxygen being depleted within a few minutes he dives back to an altitude with air and everybody chokes on the smoke from the fire) and the plane gets recovered by the autopilot avoiding a crash and then flies on autopilot and crashes who knows where.

There is more evidence that the pilot was a comitted professional stuck in an impossible situation than that he was a murderer and personally I think it's a bit unfair to assume that he is one.

It's a possible theory, but no more than that.

Have you heard about ransomware? Now's the time to ask: Are you covered?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Sure... why simply protect yourself?

Yep. I think many people have never encountered the Tao of Backup.

http://www.taobackup.com

Yes, it's 21 years old. Yes, that might be older than you, if your a new entrant to the profession. Yes, it's still relevant. Refer to the wailing wall at the end for tales of woe. Learning from other peoples mistakes and not your own can be quite handy.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Insure AFTER Checking Security ?

and probably the most important procedure of all : BACKUPS

Any organisation that actually does their overnight backups properly every night can tell, in particular, any ransomware black hats to go whistle.

If they've done offline backups, yep. If they have done online backups which have just backed up the randomwared files without any form of reversion, then they are still fucked.

Epyc fail? We can defeat AMD's virtual machine encryption, say boffins

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: None issue

That is a very good bit of detective work gentlemen, congratulations.

One might also observe that the naming of the exploit (SEVered) also seems to be rather similar to another set of vunrabilities published under the name "RyzenFall".

Almost as if a competitor is trying to damage a competitors brand name to prevent them from gaining market share isin't it? Also strange how difficult it is to get business desktops with AMD chippery in from the companies that were found to have been paid by Intel to exclude AMD from the market last time around...

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Publishing microcode ? What are you smoking ?

Given enogh eyes all bugs are shallow even applys to hardware.

Heartbleed et al have shown quite dramatically that the number of eyes is irrelevant; it's the quality of the brain behind the eyes that matters.

Trump’s new ZTE tweet trumps old ZTE tweets that trumped his first ZTE tweet

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Toddler

Firstly, i'd just like to qualify the following by stating that i'm British and have no particular interest in American politics.

Trump's overriding aim, and we shouldn't make the mistake of treating him as a complete idiot again

The thing is, that's been done already. The media has concentrated on representing him as a complete idiot since he got in. This sort of attack strategy works by reducing the perceived reputation of the target. That only works as an attack strategy if you have a public reputation that's above zero to start with.

Ok, so the media has ensured that Trump has a perceived reputation of zero. How can you reduce the reputation of somebody with a perceived reputation of zero?! You can't. It's impossible, it therefore can't and won't work and attack strategies against him at this point via the media are dead before arrival. Therefore, he will "win" this particular little game by simply appearing less stupid than the media make him out to be at his chosen point. One might observe that this does not appear particually difficult to do, and what that chosen point is likely to be.

I would put money that when the elections come Mr Trump is going to start liberally pointing things like how much more money people likely to vote for him have in their pockets, about things like rather selective reporting on issues like this (let's be honest, at least part of the sanctions/relaxations of sanctions on China have been to force China to pressure North Korea and to reward them for having tightened the screws on North Korea) and screaming loudly about the press being biased against him by not pointing these things out. By the time that people start picking his statements apart, he'll have taken advantage of the media's goldfish memory to move onto the next topic.

I said a few months into his term that I think it's more likely than not that he's going to get a second term. I might be wrong, and would be perfectly happy to be proved wrong, but FFS people? The entire world appears to have stopped thinking and acting rationally and is just reacting to him. That in itself is another well known strategy that almost always results in losing.

US websites block netizens in Europe: Why are they ghosting EU? It's not you, it's GDPR

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: VPN Hub

The mistake some people seem to make is thinking these businesses have cut themselves off. It is the EU that is cutting its people off from services that dont meet the EU's standards.

Well, the businesses have cut themselves off. If you want to sell to people in the EU then you have to follow the EU laws. If you prevent those people from accessing your website then you lose them as customers.

The irony is that most companies outside of ones that actively trade in peoples personal details are already pretty compliant anyway. American companies like newspapers/radio stations which do not operate in Europe could simply ignore the entire thing as they aren't doing anything in a jurisdiction where the courts could do anything to them.

Companies selling goods simply need to say "we do not provide your details to any third party companies that are not required to provide you the service; ie delivery companies" and they are already substantially compliant. The only real change is that they have to opt into spamming lists about the greatest offers ever instead of opting out of them.

Transferring people to a plain text site is funny, but if you are pulling the content of the HTTP GET request to get a fingerprint from the IP, web browser, screes resolution and then track pages visited etc etc etc through the webserver logs and then sell that data then it's still not GDPR compliant. If your not selling or otherwise transferring the data to a third party then you are probably pretty compliant anyway.

Can't pay Information Commissioner's fine? No problem! Just liquidate your firm

Peter2 Silver badge

If you read the comment above, it would appear that somebody pointed out to the ICO that they already have the power to prevent voluntary disolutions of companies and literially bankrupt them and also bar the director from ever holding any form of company office ever again.

Since that is basically a more extreme set of options than they were asking for it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that somebody thought it would be easier to explain how to use these existing powers to the ICO than putting a more relaxed set of laws through, which the nutty conspiracy theorists would then be shouting about.

You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Most of us knew that this was going on

The consumerate (new word) needs to adjust to the paradigm of approaching the selection of consumer products as doing business with an active adversary who is giving you functionality or a price break or both in exchange for insight into your personal life with the intent of monetizing it.

I find that it helps explain the issues to the consumer if you simplify that sentance to:-

These devices are cheap because they record your personal information and they can sell this to anybody interested in paying for it. They might not do so at the moment, but if they have that information nothing forces them to ever delete the information that they have on you. Even if the company is trustworthy, that doesn't mean they can't be bought by somebody less trustworthy.

President Trump broke US Constitution with Twitter bans – judge

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Off with his head!

So, using this precedent media companies are going to be legally required to give air time for everybody that shouts at their TV or barges onto a stage uninvited from the audience, and newspapers will be required to publish every letter?

London's Met Police: We won't use facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival

Peter2 Silver badge

Hmm.

The idea (presumably) is to identify the small minority of football holigan/anarchist types who were banned from their events of choice and who enjoy starting a riot by tossing bricks or molotov cocktails over the heads of peaceful protesters, and using the peaceful protesters as unwilling and unwitting human shields against the police response.

If the police are simply checking against those people and then doing a stop and search on them to see if they are carring... shall we say contraband? then personally I think that's fine. I think that most of the peaceful protesters who intend on attending a peaceful protest would agree with this too, since nobody really enjoys having molotov cocktails tossed over their heads and it's in everybody's interests to keep peaceful protests peaceful.

However, if the police are doing it with the intent of keeping lists for a long period of "Citizen 123456 attended a protest about $cause" then I think we can agree that's a serious problem that ought to be dealt with.

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

Peter2 Silver badge

You know, I sort of doubt this will work. But it's worth testing to see if it does, because that's how we advance.

It's a shame that when Elon tossed his Tesla towards Mars nobody thought to attach an emdrive to the car battery with a test suite.

IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

Peter2 Silver badge

As a technical community, we need to go back and figure out what we want in IPv4-next. If we are honest with the evaluation, it's certainly not going to look like IPv6.

If everybody did that, the honest answer for that IPv7 would probably be IPv4 with the addition of an extra 2 coulons to the address space, leaving everything else the fuck alone.

If we are honest, nobody really wants IPv6 for any reason other than "we are running out of addresses". The only interest served by making every computer directly and individually addressable on the internet is hackers,if we are totally honest about it. Nobody else actually wants IPv6, which is why the adoption is moving with the speed of a kneecapped sloth.

Adding an extra 2 coulons to the address space boosts the address space from IPv4's 254*254*254*254= 4,162,314,256 addresses (four billion, one hundred sixty-two million, three hundred fourteen thousand, two hundred fifty-six addresses)

to 254*254*254*254*254*254 = 268,535,866,540,096 (two hundred sixty-eight trillion, five hundred thirty-five billion, eight hundred sixty-six million, five hundred forty thousand, ninety-six addresses)

Perfect? Nope. It'd no doubt annoy the architect level types for being a kludge. But good enough? Yep. It gives everybody alive on earth several hundred thousand addresses each which is enough for the forseeable future.

Implemented easily? Yes. Ok, it requires a massive rewrite of networking code on the same scale as IPv6. But nobody needs to actually learn anything new to use it because everybody who knows IPv4 carries their entire knowledge and skillset over to it intact and can just carry on using it. So as soon as equipment is available it's going to be able to be used as default without any problem whatsoever as it's basically "no change" for all intents and purposes.

10 social networks ignored UK government consultations

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: "And after all, these companies were set up to make the world a better place"

> The number one imperative of a company is to generate a profit.

It is not.

The goals of a company will be stated in its founding and/or policy documents, and may or may not involve generating a profit, either as a goal in itself or as a means to achieving something else.

Perhaps you meant "revenue" instead of "profit"?

Revenue is vanity, Profit is sanity.

The company then might spend most of the profit on worthy causes, but they can only do that as long as the company makes money.

RAF Air Command to take on UK military space ops

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Why would airstrip one need a different GPS

Mmm, not that simple. Gas, is one of Russia's major foreign policy influencers. One of the reasons that Russia is putting in new pipelines is so they can bypass the Ukraine to their major customers and so can take further action in Ukraine (remember that country that Russia annexed the Crimera part of recently? Yeah, that one) without worrying about holes appearing in gas pipelines, leading to Russia collapsing economically since that's basically their only trade internationally.

Since the completion of this pipeline is going to lead immediately to an attack on Ukraine in either economic or military terms, one need not be a genius to see why the USA would prefer to put the completion date back...?

Further to that, the "shakedown" for NATO money is caused by the German military failing to spend the NATO target of 2% of GDP on it's forces. Everything is in theory supposed to be combat ready. Germany is spending 1.2% of GDP, largely on wages. This has led to a situation where their military which is supposed to be leading a deterent force in NATO's eastern countries is more likely to invite a strike to demonstrate how toothless they are.

https://www.thelocal.de/20180215/germany-not-very-ready-to-take-over-natos-very-ready-task-force

In addition, both their Airforce and Navy are well known to be basically inoperable (https://www.thelocal.de/20180502/german-luftwaffe-only-has-four-operation-ready-eurofighter-jets-report) which is why they are getting a lot of stick about being freeloaders from NATO, relying on other poorer countries to spend more on defence in both GDP and absolute terms.

The rationale of Britains own GPS system would be like much like of Britains military equipment; to provide something unique and higher quality than anybody else has to be a more useful ally even if we are deploying smaller amounts of it. In our case, we'd probably be trying to sell access to the privilaged military system in it to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan in financial terms and more quietly to certain middle eastern kings/princes who are friendly towards Britain for political gains like a guarenteed steady supply of gas and good future relations.

You know me, I don't know you: Hospital reportedly raps staff for peeking at Ed Sheeran data

Peter2 Silver badge

To be fair EMIS LV was decomissioned in favour of EMIS Web about a decade back.

Should this being read by any people at county PCT level, how is Emis Web doing against SystmOne these days in terms of market share?

Peter2 Silver badge

@ Anonymous Coward.

Having worked in NHS IM&T I can inform you that at least part of your records went electronic a really, really long time ago. Take a look at EMIS for a good example. EMIS entered the market in 1987. (https://www.emisgroupplc.com/who-we-are/our-history/) and around a decade or so ago had about 90% market share in our county because it was designed by doctors for doctors, and actually worked flawlessly unlike some of the competitions products.

There is a basic need to know things like allergies to drugs that most people forget, but your doctor logged on your file.

Just as a "for instance", possible but mildly rare side effects for morphine include a heart attacks, seizures, and anaphylactic shock. Somebody coming in with serious injuries screaming with pain and needing painkillers is unlikely to be in the right frame of mind to provide such information, so it's in a summary care record so that the people who need to know have the information when they need it.

Unauthorised use of patient data is of course severely punishable, and as noted in this story it does tend to actually work. Yes, trivia about stuff that happened about 30 years ago is held on a paper file because chances are that nobody can be assed to scan literially millions of old paper files for no particular reason. If it turns the ancient history is in fact needed, then somebody can always pull the paper file.

Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Cock up to triumph

I think most people do that at least once.

Having sawed a (small) hole through my workbench my next project was a clamp on table protector with an integral cutting mat to minimise future damage.

US Congress mulls expanding copyright yet again – to 144 years

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Copyright, Patents all screwed.

Within recent memory the law was that copyright lasted 70 years from the point of creation, which was both fair and easy to track. Created in 1900, copyright expires 1970.

As soon as you get into life of author + something then you actually have to figure out who the Author was, and when they died which requires a lot more time and effort that just looking at ©2018 and knowing that the copyright expires in +70 years.

It's true – it really is grim up north, thanks to Virgin Media. ISP fined for Carlisle cable chaos

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: One victim

So you send the V5 with the new keeper details at your address with $hisname c/o (care of) $youraddress on it.

Then if he goes speeding or fails to pay tax, he gets the summons rather than you.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Same Here - Derbyshire

We had somebody take out our phone line in similar circumstances. I promptly got some photos of the digger in question (knowing full well BT will get the money for reinstatement work back from the people who cause the damage when they can identify them) before getting a bit of CAT5 and splicing it in to put my line back in use (obviously without soldering it!)

When the BT engineer turned up within an hour I was to put it mildly a bit surprised at the response time, and he was just as surprised to find the severed cable neatly spliced and working...

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: One victim

Ah. You didn't send the V5 to the DVLA with the new keeper info then?

Open justice FTW! El Reg fought the law – and El Reg won

Peter2 Silver badge

Does that mean you can obtain court documentation of a perosn's criminal trial? Does that go as far as a full transcript of the proceedings?

Yes. Court documents are matters of public record. You can get pretty much anything from the court, and in fact you can sit in the court and watch a trial but you actually have to follow the procedure for obtaining transcripts etc.

https://www.gov.uk/apply-transcript-court-tribunal-hearing

Off with e's head: E-cig explosion causes first vaping death

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: limit vaping to 20 watts

Different 18650s are rated to different constant current outputs - 10A is on the low end.

Yeah, that's what people keep saying and they come out with all sorts of websites that say that, but so far every one has then backtracked or vanished when asked to produce the manufacturers info sheet of the battery with comments like, "well steve said it was ok on some web forum, so that's proof innit?".

Care to be the first person to prove me wrong? All I'd like to see is a manufacturers info sheet for a 30A rated 18650 battery and i'll concede the point.

Although even if you could produce the manufacturers info sheet then I'd still be pointing out that requiring people to use a specific higher rated battery of a standard size is daft, as the whole point of standard size batteries is that anything that fits can be used, and the fact that you physically can't put (for instance) an AAA battery in an application designed for AA is a safety measure designed to protect the end users. Deliberately buggering this when you know that most of the cells that would fit the slot could catch fire as a result is frankly idiotic.