* Posts by JetSetJim

2156 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2009

Ok Google, please ignore this free tax filing code so we can keep on screwing America

JetSetJim

Re: 'tis the Merkin way

There's at least 4 here

Gather round, friends. Listen close. It's time to list the five biggest lies about 5G

JetSetJim

Re: Chinese law

> Am I missing something, but apart from the packet header, if the contents are encrypted then it does not matter if it is being snooped or not. The sheer volume of encrypted data passing through each device would be sufficient to render on-the-fly decryption impossible, and finding anything specific to decrypt would be like finding a needle in a haystack in a hurricane.

It's probably relatively easy to filter out a specific user's traffic for a given identifier at the access network - but you need to know which temporary identifier a user is using which requires some smarts, either in sniffing more signalling (and possibly exploiting vulnerabilities to get at decrypted signalling packets), or with cooperation in the core network (i.e. the MME telling you the TMSI for a given IMSI). All you need to do then is header inspection to identify packets of interest.

You don't need to decrypt everything if all you're interested in is one person

JetSetJim

Re: Chinese law

> True, however an antenna, an amplifier and similar devices simply can't snoop without it being incredibly obvious to even the most hamfisted and blind installer that it's designed to do that

The hardware is *designed* to snoop in that it has to receive and transmit signals on designated frequencies associated with the mobile traffic for the operator - it's the software that does the snooping and there is a *built-in by design* function to do this called Legal Intercept which allows for the lawful interception of traffic for a specified set of IMSI's or other identifying information. The ability to do this in the access network is somewhat limited as the user data is only seen in encrypted form at this point, however I'm sure an edge-compute node will get specified to do the decryption in a trusted manner at least.

What everyone is instead banging on about is the concern that backdoors into this functionality is baked in to a vendors software - Cisco are known for it, so it would not be surprising (to those in the intelligence community) if other vendors also do it. However, such messing about will be tricky as the infrastructure involved is ordinarily walled off within private networks that *should* be security hardened, and it *should* be detectable when such interference happens.

It is probably a storm in a teacup, but I'm not entirely sure how big the teacup is.

JetSetJim

An IoThingie probably doesn't use that much radio resource - until someone comes up with a constantly streaming video IoThingie, most I've seen seem to dribble data up & down.

JetSetJim

> improving connectivity for (buzzword alert!) IoT.

That may be part of it, but another major use case (possibly higher up the list than IoT shite) is to provide domestic broadband as it gives the opportunity to have decent data rates to fixed antennas on properties (probably requires the homeowner to mount a decent antenna on their property, and then route that to an internal wifi router, but that's probably cheaper than laying FTTP, and should get better data rates than long-cable DSL)

JetSetJim

Re: It's complicated

> Large cells mean lower capacity, as the capacity of every cell is limited.

Incorrect, large cells mean covering larger number of users, therefore more contention and lower service levels for each user. The capacity of the cell remains unchanged. The quantity of potential traffic to be served by a cell is what changes with range (and population density), and operators try to balance that to get maximum ROI for each cell without impacting performance to each subscriber (for a given value of acceptable performance which may vary per operator).

JetSetJim

Re: 700 MHz is supposedly the best

In general the lower the frequency the better the propagation.

Complex automation won't make fleshbags obsolete, not when the end result is this dumb

JetSetJim

Re: It all starts with bad design

I am wondering whether to spike my emails to folks on Gmail with white-text itineraries at the end of each email to see if GCal ingests those automatically...

Boffins bring home the bacon as AI-powered robo-medic performs heart surgery on pigs

JetSetJim
Pint

Re: So...

> No pigs were harmed

and

> The robotic catheter managed to navigate to the right position 79 times out of the 83 trials carried on five pigs

In the 4 that failed, what was the clinical outcome?

Very interesting, though, and I'm sure a fleshy human would find it hard to have that success rate on a beating heart

Cheapskate Brits appear to love their Poundland MVNOs as UK's big four snubbed in survey again

JetSetJim

Re: Four Yorkshiremen

>There's practically nowhere you could plonk down a tower that wouldn't cover at least a few people.

Yeah, but if you plonk it too close to one of your other towers on the same band, you'll get interference and user experience suffers, and if you plonk it too far away then all their calls will drop when they move about a bit.

Plus, you also need to plonk that tower down near power and backhaul infrastructure, and get planning permission to plonk it in a nimby's backyard.

It's not entirely trivial to do all that, you plonker :)

JetSetJim

> GiffGaff: Very easy/low commitment to give it a try.

>Even better: When you do, you find out very quickly that the bandwidth available to data is absolutely appalling

And there's the rub - shopping around for a deal with an alternate provider can net you a good deal on the face of things, then you start using it and find out you would probably like to go back to your old provider but find they won't let you back in on the same deal.

Other utilities are comparable - switch leccy to a "budget" provider, and your voltage doesn't drop to 200V AC, you will instead get the same "service". The problem with switching mobiles is that it is difficult to try before switching or compare without having 2 phone contracts running in parallel, and every location in the country will have a similar problem.

It would be nice if there was legislation saying "if you leave your provider but want to come back within a certain short time window because the alternates you are trying are crap, you should be able to come back on the same contract, with the same perks as when you left" *

(*) Happy to be told I missed out on an important announcement and given a link to news that says just this!

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp

JetSetJim

Re: Business as Usual for Accenture

> I would hope that someone at Hertz kept a journal of all the Accenture powerpoints promising how wonderful the website would be and progress against milestones...

That would be "sales collateral", and probably not admissable in court as all sales material is generally labelled as a work of fiction. Dated, reviewed and signed product specs such as those listed in the article (responsive design, non-PDF documentation, etc...), plus emails/server logs showing transfer of those materials to Accenture, are much better

JetSetJim

Re: Business as Usual for Accenture

I think most large consulting or software dev houses do something similar - it's just the classic bait & switch. Put your most competent people front of house for sales pitches & initial bit of work, then move them on to the next pitch asap and replace with your cheapest employees (not that you change what you charge). I've seen it so many times, and most times the relationship between the companies is so weakly worded that the consultants can get away with it. It looks like in this case that Hertz at least has some good documentation showing that Accenture fubar'ed the work, so I hope they win their day in court and take 'em to the cleaners.

UK cautiously gives Huawei the nod for 5G network gear sales

JetSetJim

Re: Wonders never cease..

Meh - it's still probably got loopholes glaore. 5G is gloriously distributed computing, so Huawei can probably classify something as RAN that can hoover up all sorts of data - MEC platforms in particular would seem like something they would focus on, as they can do RAN functions and don't need to sit in the traditional core.

Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table

JetSetJim

Re: My intake has gone up...

> Ten per cent of America’s population guzzled about 55 per cent of all the boozy beverages

The top 10% of consumers of anything probably consume about half of that substance/resource. It's just the way things are. The only thing more skewed is personal wealth

We know you all want to shove AI where the sun doesn't shine. And that's exactly where it's going – detecting prostate cancer

JetSetJim

Indeed and, while promising, training on 400 scans with a total of 728 lesions doesn't seem like nearly enough data to train on by several orders of magnitude, so very early days for this I would have thought.

Six foot blunder: UK funeral firm fined for fallacious phone calls

JetSetJim
Mushroom

Icon, it's the only way

JetSetJim

Only if you could block them from blocking numbers on the phone.

JetSetJim

But perhaps the 3rd party provider should also be named/shamed/fined? Are the ICO looking into the distribution of the personal information? Else the lead provider will continue to profit from handing out details of folks it shouldn't be disseminating.

As long as there's fibre somewhere along the line, High Court judge reckons it's fine to flog it as 'fibre' broadband

JetSetJim

> How many people are piping their gigabit FTTH into enterprise class routers and sticking with wired connections? Not many.

My router doesn't need to be enterprise class, but my connections are wired (apart from phones and tablets, natch) and I demonstrably get my FTTP speeds (100mbps up and down, other higher rate packages available) at all times on those devices.

The main reason CityFibre et al are "whining" is that they try and differentiate themselves from BT, which sells "fibre" that is different to the true fibre they are offering - so folks might say "but I already have fibre" when comparing, even though they don't.

Whether they need fibre is another question, but hey-ho.

JetSetJim
Windows

I wasn't trying to imply the Justice was bent, merely that commercial interests weigh in on both sides of the argument.

IANAL, so yes, I have no idea what a Court of Justice is for, or what the requirements for bringing a case to them might be, but I do still hold out hope that truth in advertising will prevail, and FTTC can no longer be conflated with FTTP.

JetSetJim
FAIL

> The judge dismissed Cityfibre (and Hyperoptic)'s legal arguments in part because "it would suit their commercial interests if that were the case".

And in whose commercial interest is it for the judge to rule this way. It should be no issue that there is a commercial interest in a ruling, the ruling should represent what is correct/fair/just, and this sure as shit doesn't. In practice, anyone can now be sold a "fibre broadband" product with wet-string at the consumer end because at some point their traffic is nigh on guaranteed to transit a fibre link.

Yay, you lose weight and get rad hardened in space! Nay, your genes go awry and your brain slows down when you return to Earth!

JetSetJim

Re: Causes and effects

Didn't notice the miscellaneous auto corrects made by my phone. This reads horribly!

Meant to say that they should have kept the ground based twin in the same circumstances as the space based one to help isolate what is caused by being in space vs being on earth

JetSetJim

Re: Causes and effects

They should have such the other twin on the same diet, and kept them in a ground based much up if the ISS to compensate as best they could to those variables to try and isolate what is attributable to space Vs other environmental factors

London's Metropolitan Police arrest Julian Assange

JetSetJim
JetSetJim

Maximum sentence for jumping bail is (apparently) 12 months, so could do that and still be sent to Sweden to face at least a portion of the music there.

JetSetJim
Joke

Re: International Law

> I'd take 'em more seriously if they could spell 'illegally', frankly.

I bet you spent ages proofing that sentence for spelling errors....

Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity

JetSetJim

Re: Oh, it's a new tax year here in the UK

> This is another one of those situations where the rest of the world stares open-mouthed in disbelief at how America does things

True, but should this legislation pass, how long before the lobbyists money starts trickling across the pond?

The whole Making Tax Digital thing on VAT as a case in point - HMRC won't produce free software to do the submission, and is closing off the rather simple VAT return portal to those businesses that have to switch to this scheme, and will roll it out to everyone, and will then increase the scope of it to include uploading individual transactions.

Perhaps this will decrease VAT fraud (e.g. the carousel crowd), but at what cost to both HMRC and to UK plc (and what benefit to corporate accounting software houses)?

Who had 'one week in' for a Making Tax Digital c0ckup? Well done, you win... absolutely nothing

JetSetJim

Re: Working closely with developers

Might not need a refund - depends on whether the direct debits get actioned or not. Certainly I'd expect any late payment fees to be waived.

JetSetJim
Coat

Maybe they haven't migrated from the sandbox :)

It's alive! Hands on with Microsoft's Chromium Edge browser

JetSetJim

Re: Privacy? We've heard of it,

Are they replacing blocked ads with their own vetted ads yet (at least that's what Wiki says they want to do)?

Not trying to bash them, as have not tried it - I'd be interested in a non-Google browser that synched various things (e.g. form fill data) securely between my phone and PC (which seems to be a Beta feature of Brave at the moment). Vivaldi doesn't seem to be available on the phone

If there's 5G connectivity but no 5G devices on it, does it make a sound? Wait, no, that's not right

JetSetJim

Manchester

Err - wasn't their Manchester demo 2 months ago first?

Mystery of the Chinese woman who allegedly tried to sneak into Trump's Mar-a-Lago with a USB stick of malware

JetSetJim

Re: Sounds unprofessional all round

> Why produce TWO passports?

It's moderately common among business travellers - one to be sent off for a visa for trip N+1 while away on trip N. Alternatively to stop a country from seeing you've been somewhere they don't like - e.g. it used to be the case with Israel and some Arab nations, although I've heard now that Israel puts the stamp on a piece of paper stapled into your passport, which can therefore easily be removed.

UK tech's gender pay gap: HP Inc closest to parity with 1.8% sliver – Civica, Huawei, Siemens straddle 40% chasm

JetSetJim

Misnomer for the survey data

The reporting on this data is a bit iffy, imho. While I agree that there is a job-specific gender pay gap in the UK job market, this data set does not compare jobs at all, but instead reflects only on salary of all employees in a company.

What the data implies more is a job-disparity, perhaps partly reflective of all those male baby-boomers being in the more senior positions (due to being the ones with the experience to do those roles, due to historic (and probably continuing) sex-discrimination), and thus earning more than those in the junior positions.

It will take time to achieve pay parity in this data set, as it requires the under-represented female gender to achieve job-parity to be a true comparison between the genders. When there is an equal number of women and men in each position in a company, then this metric becomes valid, until then, continue the fight to ensure that women have an equal opportunity for each job (as well as the corollary of having the same pay).

One of the frequent examples called out (at least in recent times) is the disparity between male and female pay at Tescos, which is brought about by their warehouse staff earning more than the shop-floor staff. Guess what, there are more men than women in the warehouse, and more women than men on the shop-floor. Within each category, the men and women earn exactly the same. Whether the warehouse job has more value than the shop-floor job, I cannot say - but it does to Tescos. I would also hope that at the very least the rate of application to each post from each of the sexes is reflective of the balance of the sexes in that role (e.g .if the qualified applicant rate for a post is 60% male, 40% female, then perhaps that should be the ratio of m:f employees in that role).

It's a complex area, and I think this dataset inadequately represents the extent of the problem.

UK.gov: Hi, it looks like you're procuring comms infrastructure. Might we suggest... all vendors?

JetSetJim

It's fairly common for the core to be one vendor and the RAN to have more than one other vendor - IOT (Inter-Operator Testing) takes care of that, and it's in the vendors interest to do this properly even if they'd like to have the complete network footprint as a sale.

What normally happens in the RAN is that an area is defined as "here be Ericsson", and that will be their footprint. Messing around with that paradigm is folly, as the performance statistics of one vendor will not necessarily equate to those of another vendor, therefore you'd need to expertly merge that data to properly understand what your network is doing in an area with multiple vendors.

There are some standards defined performance metrics (TS 32.403. IIRC - that might be the UMTS one, anyway), but they're possibly not the most informative stats for network diagnostics. It would probably be quite hard for a RAN engineer to trace issues as the user(s) experiencing those issues move between vendor sites.

Yup, it's the new tax year: If you smell a RAT, it's because crims are ramping up tax scams

JetSetJim

Re: Contact your local friendly tax office directly

I wonder if that trick works for 03xx numbers...?

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

JetSetJim
Coat

Re: Doesn't this destroy the vest?

They may well be constructed with kevlar plates, and perhaps you can replace the damaged/impacted one and patch the hole in the material, rather than buy an entirely new vest.

Mine's the one with lots of kevlar in the pockets

Lend me your ears and AI will play with your brain: Machine voice imitators outsmart us

JetSetJim
Mushroom

Re: Need more knowledge how the black box works

> I had no idea what was going on in the black box. Nor do I know if I could trust it

The crux of the problem with AI/NN. There are a few tools around that attempt to give insight into this (IIRC, there was one that illustrated what features of an image a NN was using to classify cars moderately recently), but even these aren't the best indicators and I didn't really gain a sense that the indicators were meaningful - e.g. there was a wolf / dog classifier trained on a large number of images, but it turned out it was learning on the fact that all the wolf images in the training set had a snowy background.

It's the inability of the NN to tell you what it is doing, plus the high risk of innocuous biases in the training data that will lead to many failures in NN deployments, and I would not trust it to do anything remotely safety-critical until this is addressed.

Saying that, there are probably many cases of the brain behaving in exactly the same manner - in how many cases for this experiment (or any other human vs AI experiment for that matter) could the individual enumerate precise reasons why they classified a voice as fake/real? Sometimes it's possible, for sure, but other times it's more arm-waving

Finally, after years of dunking on Magic Leap, El Reg's Kieren tries out the techno hype goggles. And the verdict...

JetSetJim

Re: Has someone missed an opportunity?

I believe there are devices that exist in optometrists that do something rather similar based on measuring the curvature of the eyeball - at least to get to a ballpark prescription that can then be fine tuned with the weird Clockwork Orange glasses and "is it better with this lens, or this lens" questionnaire

JetSetJim

the distance between pupils is also key to getting the eyes aligned in a pair of glasses - the position of the lenses in the frame matters.

JetSetJim

Average cost of a pair of specs in the US is $253 (as at 2011), and £148 in the UK (from 2005). IIRC, manufacturing cost is around $7-10. Several online companies are trying to break the stranglehold Luxxotica (and a couple of others) have, but the main problem is you still need to go to an optitian to get your prescription and you ideally need to get one to fit the glasses to you.

Glasses are all made in one or two sizes, generally, so that adds to the problem. Would be interesting to see more on the fitting process that North uses....

This is not, repeat, not an April Fools' Day joke: 5 UK broadband vendors agree to pay YOU daily rate for fscked internet

JetSetJim
Mushroom

Re: About Time!

it's not even minimum wage, for instance. And BT charges £85 for an iffy callout, so seems reasonable to mirror that for a no-show

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

JetSetJim
Joke

Re: It's 2019 and...

Nah - it just runs Windows Update, trashes the system perfectly. Have just fixed a system that did an update that left it in a state where I was looking at a blinking cursor on boot.

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

JetSetJim

Re: Higher was better

Also, what load is the 60m mast rated and, and what is the effect of adding a bunch of antennas and cable to that?

Equally, what space is available at the bottom to install cabinetry for the main bit of electronics that makes up the base station?

How far is the nearest access to fibre backhaul?

If the site is only accessible over private land, what are the access rights?

The list goes on...

Huawei savaged by Brit code review board over pisspoor dev practices

JetSetJim

Re: Real point here

And what do you do when nobody does particularly well? You still need critical infrastructure, but it seems like all the players are a bit Swiss-cheese

Cops use bread and riot shields in desperate bid to contain crazed swan running amok in streets

JetSetJim
Joke

Re: Bread and riot shields...

Things are certainly going to go up the Swannee, post-brexit

100MW bit barn farm in Ireland faces planning appeal from – yep – same guy who helped sink Apple's application

JetSetJim

Who'd have thought - here in the UK only the applicant can appeal a planning decision (source), whereas people who commented on an application can also appeal in RoI (source). Much more sensible over there (although perhaps it may add rather a lot to the administrative burden with all the NIMBY's in the UK).

Good on him, takes a lot of work to go up against expensive planning consultants

6 days to go, no sweat, just more than a million UK firms still to sign up to Making Tax Digital

JetSetJim
Headmaster

For Americans...

> I don't understand the article as an American

In the UK, when businesses buy something for use in the business they still have to pay the VAT (a sales tax). Roll all the VAT charges of stuff bought, and call it amount A.

That business then sells something (product/service) to someone or some other business - they then charge this tax to their customer. Roll all these taxes up and call it amount B.

Some items are exempt from VAT charges (e.g. train tickets when you buy them, bank fees), it's not completely trivial to work it all out, but it's not rocket scientist and a lot of folks just build an Excel spreadsheet to do it for them

At the end of every quarter (or possibly annually), the company then pays (receives) the amount (B-A) to the govmt (or receives a refund if it's negative).

Currently, the online tax return form has at most 7 numbers to fill in (to also account for sales to/purchases from the EU), and it's a piece of piss to log in to the govmt website, go to the "Submit VAT return" area, fill those numbers in, and click Submit.

Govmt, in its infinite wisdom, are "Making Tax Digital" by insisting on building a moderately simple API into this, not providing software that uses it, and trusting "free enterprise" to provide these tools to businesses to submit these returns - as part of this the manual entry method will be closed off to businesses. This is particularly painful for small businesses as it potentially adds further accounting charges to buy/maintain software that provides access to this API, when it's just a simple task anyway.

Also, this is probably just the start of a "modernisation" of VAT reporting - currently it is only mandatory for companies with revenue over a particular threshold, but it will eventually get rolled out to every business, and I wouldn't be surprised if the reporting requirements eventually expand to actually submitting your individual business transactions to the govmt, rather than what is effectively summary data.

All this in the name of "making it simpler for business, with lower likelihood of mistakes" (it isn't), and "making fraud investigations simpler" (I can see this if the auditing tools were developed well on the solution with all the transactions uploaded, but equally I can see them being completely fucked up and falsely identifying loads of folks as fraudsters).

But you'll end up with a massive govmt database of every business transaction, which of course could never be abused...

JetSetJim

MTD is still a complete fluster-cuck. Having to buy in (*) something to fill in 7 numbers on a web-form seems pointless, particularly if you close off the alternative method of "just log in, click on 'submit return button', transcribe numbers from spreadsheet, check 'em, and then click 'submit return'".

Why could they not just release a simple Excel plugin that adds a new sheet to your spreadsheet with a fixed format, asks you to select where the data comes from on your spreadsheet, specify your login credentials and then gives you a "submit" button in Excel, I don't know (and even this would be a pain in the arse as I bet it wouldn't remember the credentials for security reasons)

(*) free stuff is out there, but I'm guessing the non-trivial businesses will just eat the slightly increased subscription to their accounting packages/people to have the API integrated