* Posts by JetSetJim

2156 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2009

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

JetSetJim

Re: The Truth?

I'm looking forward to the fraud charges playing out in the courts, as I understand it he can be pardoned for federal crimes - assuming he admits guilt, which is another kettle of fish - but not state crimes. With a bit of luck he can do some time, and that should save a chunk of cash on secret service protection for starters.

One theory had him resigning before 20th Jan so Pence could (briefly) take office and offload any pesky federal prosecutions, although surely that pre-supposes charges are brought before then.

I wonder if Biden will pardon him, though, if only to attempt to unite americans a bit. Nixon got pardoned by Ford, after all

New lawsuit: Why do Android phones mysteriously exchange 260MB a month with Google via cellular data when they're not even in use?

JetSetJim

Re: Don't assume malice here

Yes, but the point I was making is that determining state is an OS level thing, not an app thing. The OS can poll on a requested periodicity and notify subscribed apps to the result, same as for GPS taking a fix on the requested periodicity and then lets subscribed apps know the result

JetSetJim

Re: Android data robbery

Llamalab's Automate can help you. Set a profile along the lines of "see home wifi, turn off mobile data & bluetooth", or "between 11pm and 7am, be in airplane mode"

JetSetJim

Re: Don't assume malice here

My daughters iPhone used to do 250MB/month easily even with all games set to wifi only. It was "Apple system services" using it up. Cheaper contract for higher allowance means I haven't checked this in a while...

JetSetJim
Boffin

Re: Don't assume malice here

> It doesn't take many other services that poll every few seconds to see if anything's happened (hangouts, gmail, play services, assistant, maps, location sharing...) to make "only" 250MB per month look pretty good.

Connectivity status should be a system service, so only one set of polling from the OS and this then informs other apps/services the status and if it changes (and they have to subscribe to receiving those notifications). IIRC this is what happens in Android when you write an app that polls for RF measurements. One minor caveat, I think there are levels of polling which dictate frequency (at least there was in GPS), so the OS does the polling at the highest subscribed rate.

MediaTek's latest chip promises 5G for the proles: Destined for those not-so-high end smartmobes

JetSetJim

> with some estimates fingering the drain at 20 per cent higher than bog-standard LTE

I'm sure it's true that 5G drains more power than LTE, but I wish they'd cite it as "x% more per MHz of spectrum" or "x% more per Mbps" as you can't tell what they're comparing. LTE can go up to 20MHz per carrier, and you can do multiple carriers (up to 5) with carrier aggregation (CA), and different coding schemes. 5G dials that up a notch, allowing you to agregate up to 800MHz of spectrum for a single UE.

Remember so-not-a-pirate Kim Dotcom? New Zealand’s highest court has just said the USA can extradite him for copyright naughtiness

JetSetJim
Paris Hilton

Big fella

..I wonder if he could use the "increased risk of death from CV-19" angle to further delay things

GitHub warns devs face ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while hinting how to beat the RIAA

JetSetJim

Is the stable on fire?

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

JetSetJim

Re: Team America: World Police

Perhaps I should have used the joke icon rather than get me coat icon :(

JetSetJim
Coat

Re: Team America: World Police

> Additionally, prison is not just about punishing people, part of the goal is supposed to be to rehabilitate people so after they serve their sentence they can be functional law-abiding members of society.

Liberal lefty, Priti has a different opinion

JetSetJim

Re: Team America: World Police

I believe extradition starts with "who asked first". e.g. there may have been a queue of 38 prosecutors from around the world asking, but the US was at the front of that queue.

It's why St Julian is currently on the hook for going to the US, as the Swedes dropped their charges, which pushed the US to the front.

Not sure how it works for "extradition request vs local prosecution". I'd have hoped it was domestic first before extradition.

Yes, we have a 5G iPhone now. But that doesn't mean 5G has arrived

JetSetJim
Boffin

Re: Hmmm

NSA mode is not limited by the LTE leg - Verizon (and others) can do 5Gbps over NSA - 4.2Gbps of it is 5G, and 800Mbps over LTE.

Admittedly it's with a boat load of spectrum (800MHz of 5G + 40MHz of LTE), but still impressive. And for sure the backhaul has to be capable of it, too.

UK mapping agency the Ordnance Survey is heading into gaming territory with £6m tender for dev team

JetSetJim

OSM even has quite a few errors with roads. Was doing some route-matching a while back and there were intersections where the roads didn't join up, off-ramps that didn't join a road, etc... Too many holes to fix quickly

JetSetJim

Re: Virtual exercise?

This just needs shrinking a bit. There's a few indoor ski treadmill places about. Not tried one, and would hope that crash detection and applying the brakes is well designed.... Scarily, they put more than one person on at once...

Samsung to introduce automatic call blocking on Android 11-capable flagships

JetSetJim

Re: How does it work?

> I've honestly reported over 300 numbers, and for a single person, that's not shabby

I'm married, so only a few dozen so far. It might help that my number pre-dates the TPS and it went on their list toot-sweet (possibly before they started admitting mobile numbers officially), so perhaps not as passed around as others as I don't get all that many of these calls.

JetSetJim

Re: How does it work?

Unless there are some tells in the inbound call setup message headers, I'm not sure what they can do beyond the already implemented number blocking (Hiya is active on my S7, presumably I won't get this upgrade). All the "calling about the accident you had" (a) use the same recording and (b) have caller numbers set to landlines from all over the place. They all get blocked on my phone, and reported, but the cost to change the number to whoever is doing this is obviously trivial and probably more effort than my blocking it.

The sooner telco's make it impossible to spoof caller info the better - or just block all peer networks that generate sufficient quantities of spoofs

UK state of the Internet report: Virgin Media 'fast', BT's PlusNet last

JetSetJim

Re: Vermin media here

> service providers who block tethering

Err - no-one blocks tethering nowadays (in the UK, at least), although some may have caps on it in some circumstances (e.. PAYG) but even they're reasonably generous

https://www.choose.co.uk/guide/tether-mobile-phone-wifi-hotspot.html

JetSetJim

I'm with VM, it would not surprise me to find there's a list of speedtest providers that are not traffic shaped, but then it wouldn't surprise me if they all did that, so maybe there's a "level playing field" there! I have a 200mbps contract, I think, and speedtest.net currently reports it at 91mbps dl + 19mbps ul, but there's a wireless leg in the link and I'm on a conference call sharing that.

On the face of it I'm moderately happy with them - I've not noticed any throttling even throughout lockdown, but I've not been testing for it. Oftimes I've been running a VPN with video conferencing at the same time as SWMBO on a video conference and kids streaming something from Netflix and no-one has complained.

JetSetJim
Unhappy

Am on Virgin, but miss being on Gigaclear

Apparently to get on this list, you need to be the source of >3% of the speed tests - but I wonder if that's skewed as perhaps people only check speeds when commissioning and when there's a problem.

Is Google fudging search rankings to benefit pages that embed YouTube vids? Or is this just another ‘bug’?

JetSetJim

Re: title is too long now... mutter mutter... "...<h1> tag"

I would love it if there was a way of forcing websites to define what the minimum JS domain includes are for it to function. e.g. for El Reg, just need to allow theregister.com, but can block doubleclick and google-analytics. NoScript is great, but when you actually *do* have to use a website that bloats many domains worth of JS, it's a pain guessing which one is the one that enables a button.

NASA hires Nokia to build first 4G network on the Moon as part of plan to boldly go back to lunar surface by 2024

JetSetJim

Re: No risk of signal detection on Earth from the Moon

If they want 1Gbps via 4G, they'll be using a lot of carriers, carrier aggregation and MIMO. Vanilla SISO LTE in 20MHz of spectrum (the largest a single carrier can be) offers ~75Mbps @ 64QAM.

They'll probably have it a bit easier as they won't be having large numbers of mobiles to worry about, so the RF schedulers will be quite lightweight, and the "atmospheric loss" in the propagation model will be greatly reduced (also presumably it will all mostly be line of sight, perhaps antennas built into the space suit). I don't think they'll have that much trouble streaming 4K video, if they wanted to.

Frequency plan? Probably the higher frequencies as the range is unlikely to be a worry, and no worry about getting indoor coverage.

JetSetJim

Re: China?

5G is not just high bandwidth, also low latency and high capacity. I imagine they have use cases for the 4G they're installing, though

JetSetJim

Re: Bell Labs

They bought it as part of Alcatel Lucent about 6 years ago

JetSetJim
Joke

Re: Oops

Not the moon walk, I hope

JetSetJim
Coat

Re: Protesters

...or a step towards covid on the moon

JetSetJim

Re: Purely on grounds of practicality

beware the solar winds :)

Seriously, it will may well need them due to moon-quakes - lots of seismic activity

GSM gateways: Parliament obviously cocked up, so let minister issue 'ignore the law' decree, UK.gov barrister urges court

JetSetJim
Coat

They now have a precedent for breaking the law in a limited and specific way

Lift us up where we belong: UK's Network Rail puts elevators online

JetSetJim

Re: Simon will be *very* happy...

One would hope that this is read-only, not remote control.....

Also hope the work isn't outsourced to Serco

Indonesia’s black-market phone prevention plan bricks a whole bunch of handsets

JetSetJim

Re: What about roaming?

It may well depend on the network architecture. Back in the day when I last looked at this sort of thing there was a concept of a VLR that had partial network coverage, going back to the HLR for anyone it didn't know about. Equally, it may well be in the first NAS message into the core network (for a new UE), but that message is not read by the HLR, but the MME (in LTE), which then has to query the HSS which does a DB lookup to determine status and reply.

Anyway, IMSI contains Mobile Network and Country Codes as first 5/6 digits, so you just read the numbers and can tell if it's yours or if it's a roamer. No need to do a DB lookup to identify a roamer.

JetSetJim
Boffin

Re: What about roaming?

IMEI doesn't have a "country code", so suspect this is achieved via "if the attach request contains a foreign SIM (per IMSI), don't bother with enhanced IMEI checks. If the attach request contains a domestic IMSI, request equipment authentication"

The signalling for attaching to the network contains optional messages to query either or both (or none) of the IMSI or the IMEI.

JetSetJim
Coat

Re: Purchase the correct tool once.

That's my mistake, then - I keep Thing1 and Thing2 in my toolbox and everytime I open it I end up having to rebuild the house.

JetSetJim

Yup, the UK bust through that metric a while ago, for instance. wrt Indonesia, wiki only lists the number of subs of two operators, and they're a bit out of date. There's at least 3 other operators in the country, so fully expect the population of mobiles to exceed the population.

JetSetJim

Given there's 260m+ Indonesians, and the top 2 operators have more than 220m subscribers between them (src: wiki), both Excel and Access will readily break

JetSetJim
Coat

I hope they weren't using an "Excel database"

Mark Zuckerberg, 36, decides that having people on his website deny the deaths of six million Jews is a bad thing

JetSetJim
Paris Hilton

Re: So it only took this long?

username = "naive" says something?

JetSetJim
Coat

Re: Does this also mean...

nah - Soros has told them to stop taking the contracts, as they're obviously in his pocket

JetSetJim

Re: Meh

I believe Parler is the one where all the nutjobs go

JetSetJim

Re: So it only took this long?

why "flat earth atheists" and not just "flat earthers"? I'll bet there's a ready supply of "flat earth Christians" amongst others.

Pack your bags! Astroboffins spot 24 'superhabitable' exoplanets better than Earth at supporting complex life

JetSetJim

I'm r reading it again for the nth time, still discovering new bits. Or my memory is deteriorating, one of the two.

JetSetJim

Re: Crowdfund an Orion Class shpaceship?

I might not have accounted for ac/deceleration in my calculations..... But after a quick abuse of Excel, turns out accelerating at 1G for 35.4 days gets you to 10% of C, so that should be lost in the rounding of numbers I did.

JetSetJim

Re: A larger planet means more gravity

Yes, and how does that vary as a function of gravity? Presumably things will shrink when gravitational pull increases, but by how much?

JetSetJim
Coat

Re: Crowdfund an Orion Class shpaceship?

> As even if you could accelerate to 10% of the speed of light it would still take 7000 years to get there

I've (hopefully) got good news for your project - if it's only 701 light years away, and you can get to 10% of the speed of light toot-sweet, you will experience a mere fraction of that travel time in your metal Mayflower. Just 6,940 years. Thank you, Einstein.

JetSetJim

Re: A larger planet means more gravity

> Which, in turn, will have an impact on the maximum height of any multicellular organism out there.

Yes, but so does the oxygen content. More O2 => bigger creatures.

I'd be interested to see the plot of O2 vs gravity vs creature size... Bit difficult to run that experiment at the moment, though

JetSetJim
Boffin

If we're inventing magic FTL, I've also invented a shield dingus that harmlessly funnels those particles into the drive as fuel. But yes, nipping through a friendly wormhole might be easier. Using Gay Deceiver even more so

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

JetSetJim

Re: but reimplementing them is what Oracle thinks they can forbid you from doing

> Standards also can have patent issues. I'd expect your LTE example hinges more on patents than copyright.

They do indeed, but given there are freely available open-source implementations of LTE I suspect the implementation license is rather liberal and they'll only try and take a bite from you when you sell it

New Workspace for your WFH office? Nah, it's just Google shooting G Suite with the rebrandogun

JetSetJim

Re: Serious question - usability?

Couple of years back our whoe company moved from office to G on the back of some over-promoted bright spark in IT. It lasted 6 months, everybody hated it.

SWMBO has to work with it for one of her clients, hates it, particularly as they've mashed it together with confluence with no clear boundary as to what documents belong in what tool. Really difficult to find anything

Former antivirus baron John McAfee collared, faces extradition to America on tax evasion, securities allegations

JetSetJim

Re: My question is...

There's some others too, I seem to recall Mr Gadd got done using such laws, or may have prompted the legislation itself.

JetSetJim

Re: John McAfee

No, just that there's lots more documented material to work from. I won't give spoilers, and I have a huge backlog of episodes to get through now that I no longer commute and don't get time to listen.

I'm tempted to get my own machete, though. And bolt-cutters. (you may find this a common theme to the series...)

JetSetJim

Re: is he still a US citizen ?

> You pay tax on the income that generates those cash balances.

Yes, the IRS is chasing him for income from his digital currency adventures. If that income was held in a company, and merely spent for his personal gain (similar to Trump), then his bill would be a lot lower (assuming he can get away with such expenditure for personal gain as tax deductible). Until the company relocated the cash back to USA, it would not become liable for US taxes, just the local corporation tax so he can pick a friendly/convenient tax haven to host the company

JetSetJim

Re: John McAfee

I might tentatively agree, except I've listened to the Behind the Bastards podcasts about him. Not entirely sure he's someone I'd care to think positively about, even if he's definitely interesting to hear about.