Posts by SImon Hobson

Re: Apple Ordered To Pay $234m In Damages To University Of Wisconsin

Patent infringement is completely unrelated to whether anything is closed or open source. So the comment is really completely irrelevant.

Re: Add more root servers

> The BCP Standard quoted looks to be 15 years old. Why has it taken operators this long to adhere to it?

Because it costs to implement it, and it costs nothing to stick your fingers in your ears and go "la la la la".

> Terrorists are like airliner crashes. Sure, the odds are low, but when an airliner goes wrong, it tends to go wrong BADLY

And they make the headlines, not because of the numbers of casualties, but because of it's "unusuality". Ie plane crashes make the news because they are uncommon, terrorist events make the news because they are uncommon.

The car crashes (note the plural) every day generally don't make the national news unless they are particularly newsworthy (involve a "celebrity" or an unusually large number of people, or involve children) simply because they aren't really that newsworthy - they happen every day.

> 20 years ago, three guys killed 160+ with a rent-a-truck and homemade ANFO. 14 years ago, some 20 guys killed 3,000 in a single morning

So you have to go back "lots of years" in order to get large numbers. More recently, the US had it's own awakening moment with their 9/11 attacks when a few thousand died. Yes I know it's easy to write that "only" a few thousand died, but I'm not trying to belittle the impact of each of those deaths on their friends and families. But what are the average figures for deaths on US roads per year ? I think the numbers are similar - in the UK I believe it's around 3000/year killed on the roads.

There's a similar effect in most areas of life. Take electricity supplies for example. Some people like to harp on about how "safe" renewables like wind and hydro are, and how "dangerous" nuclear is. But look at the real figures and nuclear is actually quite safe - with actually at least (if not more) harm caused by over-zealous "we must be seen to be doing something" reactions from officials. Look at Fukashima for example, people love to link to the videos of gas explosions blowing the cladding off the building - and calling them "nuclear" explosions. Yes hardly anyone has been, or is likely to be, harmed by anything "nuclear". People overlook the terrible fact that around 20,000 people died in the tsunami which left huge areas contaminated with raw sewage, chemicals, oils, rotting animals and human body parts, and ... And in the "must be seen to be doing something", officials still keep large areas closed off "because - it's nukular innit" in spite of the fact that the harm of keeping people from where they consider home is almost certainly significantly higher than the potential harm from "nuclear".

And then look at the figures for renewables. People like to point out how "safe" renewables are - yet lookup Banqiao Reservoir Dam and you'll find that it's failure (together with some others in the same area at the same time) caused an estimates 171,000 deaths - yes that's one hundred and seventy one thousand deaths. That's just one incident.

The problem is that people have been conditioned - deliberately by those with an axe to grind - to believe that "nuclear == mushroom clouds" and "renewables == as cuddly as your kid flying a kite on the beach". And their attitude to risk is significantly modified by these "beliefs".

The same holds for terrorism. When anything "terrorist" happens - it's splashed across the global media out of all proportion. The media do it simply because "it sells papers/airtime", but IMO such large scale coverage is aiding the terrorists by pushing a distorted view of the risk. Since the Paris attack, there's been the view cultured that (for example) going to a concert or sports match is "risky" - and of course the state authorities would like people to believe that because it means they can sell you protection from that risk.

But go and lookup some statistics - I don't have the time right now, though some are easy to find. I can recall a few incidences of non-terrorist events that have caused considerably larger numbers of casualties. Whether it's crown mismanagement that leads to crushing (the truth now coming out about Hillsborough, 98 deaths, 766 injuries), stadium seating collapsing, building roofs collapsing, walls falling on crowds (Heysel, 39 killed, 600 injured), stages collapsing (Indiana State Fair, 7 killed, 58 injured). And not to miss out the recent deaths at Mecca (over 700 killed).

So that puts terrorist murders (for that is what we should really call them) into something of a perspective.

TL;DR version. These proposals are a knee jerk "we must be seen to be doing something" response to what is actually a minor problem when compared to everything else we should be bothered about. If we accept the logic in doing this, then we are aiding the terrorists and admitting defeat - giving them exactly what they want which is to change the way we live at their beckoning. To be perfectly honest, the sort of world where terrorism is "solved" by such measures isn't the sort of world I'd want to live in. I'm sure there was no terrorism in "1984", and I don't recall any in "V" either. I recommend watching the latter and looking for the parallels with where things are currently heading.

Re: Oops!

> If an organization tries to advertise routes on the secure channel that belong to someone else ...

And that's where your whole argument falls over - because the whole point of the routing tables is that Alice has a connection to Bob (amongst others), Bob has a connection to Charlie (amongst others). So for Alice to send a packet to Charlie she needs to decide whether to send it via Bob or via another connection. She can only make that choice based on comparing the route that are offered and (in this case) concluding that Bob has the shorter/better route.

So Bob MUST advertise a route to Charlie. Bob has no a priori relationship with Charlie so the question is : given that Bob must advertise a route to an address block belonging to Charlie, how do you secure that ?

You cannot block Bob for advertising Charlie's address blocks - because if you stop Bob (and all the others) doing that, then no-one can actually send packets to Charlie without being directly connected.

There's your challenge - come up with a practical method that allowed arbitrary organisations to re-transmit the routing tables securely. Other than the endpoints who just squirt stuff to their ISP and forget about it, everyone needs to know the best routes to every other destination on the internet. So you need a method to stop Zebedee who is down on the end of a long line of connections getting a route advertisement which includes Charlie's addresses, and retransmitting that claiming to be a good route for it.

Re: What were they thinking?

> ... why on earth would you let your child's information out of your control?

Because, the parents just have no clue. The readership here is probably a self selected group fo fairly technically literate people - you just have to read some of the comments against various "spooks" and "privacy" related stories to see that the majority seem to be fairly technically literate and understand the basics of security and privacy.

Once into "the real world", the parents that buy these just don't think of them as other than "a kids toy" with nice extra features. When they signed up, the licence and privacy statements (if presented at all) will have been dismissed with "what's this sh*t getting in the way, lets get rid of it ASAP". I've had conversations around privacy and security where the other person basically responds "I don't care if someone reads my emails" because they really cannot see problem.

So you have a group of (mostly) not technically literate people who really don't understand that these things are computers, who probably do not even connect the fact that messaging works with anything going out into the internet, and who really don't have much grasp of security or privacy or why they are important.

I suspect that if you approached the average parent who isn't bothered by these toys and asked to fit a webcam in the child's bedroom so that strangers on the internet could watch them, then you get a response ranging from a 2 word response ending with "off" to having a chat with the local plod !

Most people could understand the concept of a camera making images and sound available over the internet - and would associate anyone suggesting the camera installation with "up to no good". But once you take away that "easy to see" action (install camera) and "impact" (strangers can watch your child) - then most people can't see the issue.

> ... by pointing aadg.windows.net.nsatc.net at their US servers ...

That's one of those "hmm" statements and it took me a while to figure out why I was thinking about it quite so much.

In the "Post Snowden" world, Microsoft has made a big think of having regional services - so for example customers in the UK can be assured that their data will be held in Europe and safe from the USA.

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing here ?

If "someone" has access to a user's login then they have access to that user's data.

If that "someone" has access to the Active Directory holding that user's account details, then that gives them access to the user's login - even if they have to reset the password to do it.

If that Active Directory is being run on a server in the US (or under the control of a US entity) then that means that "someone" can knock on the door, "instruct" someone to give them access and "by the way, don't mention this to anyone".

So a UK customer is secure from US access to their data ? I'm not so sure.

Re: I'm clear on this @Gorden

> "There is a clear difference between the tools GCHQ uses to do its job and the way in which it deploys those tools."

> I don't agree, I see no difference between what they're doing and what criminal Black-hat hackers do.

I disagree.

Lest take something much more down to earth and easily discussable - is it permissible under any circumstances to exceed the speed limit on a road ? So we have a law that says (to summarise) "though shalt not drive faster than the speed limit for that road".

But what about Police ? We have laws that allow the Police, under certain circumstances only, to exceed the speed limit - and I think mostly the population support that. Lets face it, if (for example) all a robber needed to do to escape was to exceed the speed limit then I think we'd have something to say about it !

But equally, if we saw coppers whizzing around all the time with no regard for speed limits regardless of what the reason is - and I don't think (to pick an old Jasper Carrott sketch) the canteen being about to run out of chips qualifies - then I think we'd have something to say about that too.

So I think the analogy is that the security services are just ignoring the speed limits all the time "because they can". Some are arguing that they shouldn't be allowed to do that at any time which I think is wrong. But there needs to be clear rules on what they can and cannot due, and someone to enforce those rules.

The big problem is that unlike a copper speeding without any good reason, it's not easy for "the man in the street" to see who is hacking what and report them. Thus there is great lack of visibility, and since the "spooks" have been caught having no regard to people's privacy or the law - we are inclined to assume that everything they do is bad.

Re: £5 for a box of popped corn?

> £9.29 for a standard adult ticket?! £11.29 for a "premium seat"

Well that's what happens when you don't support your local independent cinema(s) and lose them all. We are lucky where I live in that we still have an independent - and it's only £6 for an adult, no "premium" seats, they are all the same (old, probably the originals from when it was built !).

Re: Audio badly mixed for me

> Did anyone else out there have a similar audio issue?

I didn't notice anything - recorded off the SD channel.

Re: Needless wireless already with us.

> Change the bloody channel your router defaults to then!

That is no help when you change it to some currently unused channel - only for the neighbours device to switch channels again.

> Mine uses Channel 2 ...

You antisocial barsteward ! People like you are worse than the automatic "change channel to whatever you've just selected" version. Using channel 2 means that not only do you interfere with people using channel 1, but you also interfere with people using channel 6. Really, equipment should not allow selection of other than channels 1, 6 and 11* as these are the only 3 channels in the 2.4GHz band that don't overlap.

So by your antisocial choice of channel, you've managed to interfere with 2/3 of the neighbours instead fo just 1/3 !

* Or 13 in some places.

> now some [redacted] two streets away has boosted his wifi signal (illegally) so that many neighbours can't use their networks in the evenings.

Then report it as interference. From what I've read, OfCon can actually be useful with interference reports - especially if you show some technical nouse and and have already identified the problem.

> Seriously considering ditcihng the Wi-fi and running Cat 6 around the house when it gets rewired next year.

Just do it ! Really, if you're having the disruption of re-wiring, flood wire the place with wired network. I'm in the process of doing that as I redecorate each room. SWMBO doesn't understand it since "we've got WiFi" and I've given up trying to explain it - we've reached a detente, I don't try explaining it to her, she lets me get on with it !

Re: But

> ... the best way to get data from a computer on the desk to the iPad in your hand is to send it half way around the world via a 3rd party because Apple don't do the decades old already solved problem?

It's even worse than that. In OS X 10.9 they removed a feature that allowed exactly that "computer on desk direct to phone in hand" transfer - even for their own products. Yup, people upgrading to 10.9 suddenly found that they couldn't plug their iPhone in with the USB cable and have it sync. Why ? Because to Apple this is too old fashioned and the only way a user should be allowed to do it is via Apple's cloud service.

The outcry was loud enough that even Apple couldn't ignore it - and they re-instated Sync Services, but only enough to support Apple devices.

As an Android phone user, the fact that they destroyed the ability to sync music, photos, calendar, contacts, notes, call logs, and a few others (Missing Sync was an awesome tool) is probably just the icing on the cake for Apple.

I can't help thinking that if 70s/80s Steve Jobs had seen what 00s Steve Jobs did to Apple and "the user experience" he'd have been horrified. His early work was all about making computers for people to use as they wanted, his later work was all about making computers for people to use as Apple want - and these days what Apple seem to want is a 30% cut of everything.

> The flaw in the argument is the assumption that the 10,000 instances have a server array to themselves whilst they're running.

It really doesn't matter. The point is, in order to spin up 10,000 instances, there needs to be hardware available now with 10,000 spare instances worth of capacity. Yes in practice it may well mean 10,000 different servers all taking on one extra instance - but the point remains that prior to the usage and after the usage, there is hardware sitting there with 10,000 instances worth of spare capacity.

Now, if that spare capacity weren't needed, then (taking that worst case scenario), there are 10,000 servers all with at least one instance of spare capacity. So for every 10 servers, you can move one server's instances to those spare slots on it's nine mates, have a server doing nothing, which you could shut down or even not even have in existence.

As others have suggested, when things start maturing a bit, we'll start to see tiered pricing. Want a lot of computer power NOW - then pay through the nose for it. Want it "sometime in the next day or so" and it'll come cheap as it can be slotted in around those expensive high priority jobs. And probably several levels in between.

But then there is the question ...

If your 10,000 instance job isn't important enough to pay for priority pricing on - why run the job on 10,000 instances ? Fire up a small fraction and allow it to take longer.

Re: Not 50%

> If Openreach were to be separated all that would change is the name over the door, the economics and technology would remain the same.

Not quite. The thing that would change would be the part of economics which falls under "competition strategy".

At present, BTOR sings BT's tune - it's part of BT, and it's run by BT according to priorities set by BT. Yes there are supposed to be chines walls, but given they don't even (AFAIK) report financials completely separately ...

Thus it is within BT's power to tilt the field a bit in their favour. For example, where a cabinet serves primarily business users they may decide not to fibre enable that cabinet so as to not impact on their far more lucrative other products. Not that that's happened at all to us, or any of our customers, or ... hang on a minute, that's exactly what happened to us and several of our customers where it's taken a lot longer to fibre enable the cab (if it's happened at all) compared to those serving primarily residential areas.

BT have a looooooong history of dragging their feet on new technology so as not to injure it's cash cows. ISDN was crippled compared to other countries' offerings, ADSL came along rather late and was held back somewhat, and ...

Mostly to avoid killing their leased lines business.

Re: Derailer block

> ... putting this in a place where it can tip one train into another, might be a poor plan?

Probably a lesser of evils choice. If there are multiple parallel tracks, then if a train gets derailed off one track, it's going to be hitting whatever's on the next track.

But what's the damage if you don't stop it ?

I don't know the specific in this case, but I'm taking a guess that this derailer was one there to protect the main line - ie stop an errant train leaving the sidings when it shouldn't - for whatever reason. If you think about it, the scope for damage and/or injury rises significantly if the train had got out of the sidings where it could conflict (perhaps head-on) with in-service trains carrying passengers.

Re: Clock signals

I think the point here is that many of the chipsets already include an FM receiver.

> starting a train isn't like starting a car, just turn the key and go

I suspect some of the modern ones may well be. Manual procedures would have been used in the past simply because of the limitations of technology, but these days it's preferred to automate where practical as manual procedures are error prone.

Same applies to aircraft. "Older"* aircraft need various procedures following in a set order to get started, and with turbines especially, getting a step wrong can mean expensive damage - like a "hot start" meaning a £30k overhaul for a turbine. Many newer models (both turbine and piston) now have fully digital control where starting is just a case of "turn the key and let the system do it".

* Where "old" is a relative term, but may mean ancient !

As to why steal it ? Well someone who's been out on the pop until the early hours might not actually think that far ahead ! Perhaps they were heeding the old advice ...

Don't drink and drive, take the bustrain - I did last night, it was surprisingly easy to drive !

Re: Sometimes OS is hardware constrained

Not just hardware constraints. If your workflow relies on a feature unceremoniously dumped with little fanfare and but a tiny note in the release notes, then upgrading has to wait until you've found all the components to re-engineer that workflow.

If the ${expletive} bods at Apple hadn't pulled Sync Services because everyone must use their cloud then I'd have upgraded ages ago.

At least with locally installed stuff we have the option. At work we use Office 365 and some time yesterday Microsoft changed something - so some of us could no longer access a shared mailbox. I've got it back on my desktop (using a feature that didn't use to work), but haven't found out how to make it work on my phone or tablet yet.

Sometimes clouds will give you a soaking !

Re: Will investigators have powers to examine web server logs?

> ... when are we going to be formally informed as to our obligations ...

Oh you naive fool !

They don't inform you, you have to know - that's the basis that laws work under. They may well inform some larger operators simply because there'll be a certain amount of "negotiation" involved over technical specs to allow automated access, but in general it is your responsibility to know the law.

In a completely unrelated business field I have a hat for, there are some laws recently come into effect, and others coming into effect soon. The government have made little (if any) attempt to inform anyone, and it's being left to trade groups and the like to get the message across. For those that aren't members of one of the trade bodies, they may be in for some uncomfortable shocks.

But that's not uncommon.

> I presume they have some way of seamlessly bypassing it ...

No they don't. Don't know how you kept going (perhaps you have a good backup genny or UPS ?), but replacing the meter most definitely is a power off job - they have to have the DNO fuse(s) pulled.

Re: I'd read the contract terms carefully

> The legal debate about whether they broke the contract... will surely take ages to be resolved before you can legally claim your contract is breached - no?

No.

You can claim breach of contract at the drop of a hat. It's sufficient to inform them, preferably in writing, that they have failed to protect your data in accordance with the DPA and have failed to provide the service with "reasonable care". State that you consider them in breach of contract, and that you consider the breach non-recoverable (they can't un-lose your data).

On that basis, you consider the contract null and void, and therefore no contractual early termination fees are applicable.

Then leave for another provider.

They then have two options.

The sensible option. Accept that they've really foooked up on this and just accept it.

The likely option. They challenge you on it, because they know that the vast majority will back down because they don't know their rights. Assuming you don't back down, the worst they can do is progress it, and if they are really stupid they can take you to court - where they will almost certainly lose (the case) and will absolutely definitely lose out in terms of reputation. They know they'll lose, so they will (eventually) settle - but not before they've tried various methods of harassment.

And on harassment since it's come up. If they aren't too careful, they risk someone prepared to push it with being reported for it which is a criminal offence. So it's worth pulling that one out of the bag at some point along the lines of "Your (solicitors) letters are of a nature which contravenes Section 1 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, if I receive any more communications of a harassing nature then I will report the matter to the Police as a criminal act."

Being charges with harassment would be the cherry on the cake of their bad reputation !

Protection from Harassment Act 1997, penalty on conviction is up to 6 months inside.

href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1997/40/contents

Re: Cautiously optimistic

> my wife knows about my surfing habits

So your argument seems to be, I don't care so no-one else should ?

Now, are you sure that you've never, ever, been to a web site that either your wife or the authorities might disapprove of ? Really sure ? Sure that there's never been a link embedded in another page your've been to that's pulled in even so much as a 1 pixel image (favourite trick of the ad slingers and trackers) ?

As it happens, no I wouldn't be in the least concerned about my wife seeing my emails and web browsing history. But that sure as hell does not mean I'm happy for it to be tracked and stored in some insecure database waiting to be mined by some jobsworth from the council or spread around the world by some hackers. After all, security is so trivially easy - these days we never hear of any leaks and TalkTalk and Addison Madley are just false memories of stuff that didn't happen.

Of course, just because I'd be happy with that, doesn't mean that every person must be. I can't help thinking that it can't be that great a marriage if such things need to be secret - but that's not my prerogative to dictate.

> The phone company have always had to keep records of who we called, and when, and for how long - because that's (usually) the basis of how they bill us.

Actually, no they didn't for many many years. Up until (IIRC) something like the 70s they didn't actually record that information. Tariffs were much simpler and calls were billed in units. Billing was as simple as equipment worked out from the number dialled how often to add another unit to the bill, and at that interval it would do just that. At one time, the exchanges had use arrays of mechanical counters that tallied the units as they were triggered - and at billing time, they took photographs and data entry clerks put all the numbers into a computer so they could multiply number of units by cost to arrive at the bill.

When itemised billing was being talked about, there was actually quite a lively debate about it - for the simple reason that some people did have reason for other to not know who they were talking to !

> The MOT tests are still rolling road

Err, no they aren't. It's "car static, sample probe up tailpipe, test at idle, and with modern cat equipped vehicles, at fast idle I believe" - machine measures only CO and HC (unburned hydrocarbons).

Diesels get only a smoke test - sample pipe up tailpipe, press throttle pedal to floor until engine reaches rev limit and relax. The machine measures the optical density of the smoke. If it passes first time then that's a quick pass, otherwise the process is repeated up to another 4 times (5 times total) until it manages to pass 3 consecutive tests. Of course, pressing the pedal is supposed to be "snap" from idle to fully down, no tester would ever press it ever so slightly slower which can vastly reduce the smoke produced ;-)

> ... often the lights are timed so the the next one will go red just before you reach it ...

Not just round your way.

Around where the office is, they made a one-way system to balls things up. Lots of traffic lights, all carefully designed to show green to empty roads while traffic waits at the red lights. They'll then turn red on the empty road as the traffic from the next set of lights along the road arrives.

Re: Yo Gobshit Granny May

> The other 36% were 'persuaded' by 'you and yours' lies ...

Or perhaps, a lot of them looked at the options and thought ... "hell no, but the alternatives are far worse !". Lets face it, none of the available option at voting time had any plans to do other than this - but the others would have foooked up the economy far more badly while also foooking us over in the name or terrorism.

Re: Bah!

> Using the hose and wand attachments it is shite

Have an upvote for that, the hose arrangement is rubbish.

> I'm interested in one of the cordless ones now available

I haven't looked, but I bet any warranty excludes the battery. After earlier experiences with a Dyson cordless, I'd not buy anything they wouldn't guarantee the battery for for "a good few years". I look forward to seeing how enthusiastic people are for cordless when they find out that a) batteries tend to have short lives, and b) tend to be eye wateringly expensive when they are "custom" ones for that application.

Re: Is el reg reduced to trolling for business?

> VDSL's already doing 100Mbps

Err, you mean it can do "up to" 100M in ideal conditions. Meanwhile, back in the real world, not many people get that.

Over here in Blighty, we already have reports that VSDL2 speeds drop when more than one subscriber is connected - due to crosstalk between pairs which were never designed as radio frequency conduits. I assume this newer tech is simply more of the same - go up the frequency band for more speed and accept the faster drop off with distance. So unless there is no sharing of cables, there's going to be massively more crosstalk - so you're buggered if you and a neighbour both share a cable from the joint box on the nearest pole to the node a couple of poles up the street.

Not to mention, round out way, there will be a lot of houses that effectively would need their own node if 100m is the limit on distance to the node - and I imagine Australia with it's much larger space is similar. By the time you get to that sort of requirement, it's hard to see where the benefit is of stopping the fibre less than 100m from the house.

At ${dayjob} we still have a lot of customers who cannot get decent connectivity at all. Some of them can't even get ADSL that works. Due to terrain, wireless systems aren't that easy to do; and due to tax implications*, some of the wireless systems that were around have gone anyway.

* AIUI, our government in one of those "what can we screw up today" moves declared that such operators had to pay tax on all their infrastructure based on the potential for earnings - not any actual earnings. So each wireless repeater tower was suddenly going to get a big tax charge based on what it could earn if it's full potential capacity were sold !

The same thing was supposed to apply to operators with dark fibre lying around.

Needless to say, this wasn't applied to the incumbent operator, BT - which further skewed competition in BTs favour.

Re: No, just one...

> Perhaps if you Europeans could have done even 1/8 as much to create the same software and services that Google had, you might have a point.

Well actually, how about a lesson in real history ...

Take maps for example. Google were most certainly not the first into that market, but what they were able to do was to come in and cross subsidise their own service using the income from their dominance in advertisingsearch. So while others were in fact offering map services, Google had the advantage of an effectively bottomless money pit to subsidise theirs. Thus they were able to offer for "free"* what others had to charge for in order to pay the bills.

In addition, Google's dominance in search meant that they could push their own mapping to the top of the search results** - thus ensuring that lots of people got to find out about it very quickly, while others got pushed down the search results and thus lost users.

So don't go saying "no-one tried to do <blah>" when in actual fact people were trying to do those things - they were just crushed by the minor issue of having to pay bills while having to compete with "free"*. Plenty of people were doing stuff, before this 800lb gorilla came along and actively destroyed every market it felt like entering.

That is why there are so many complaints/legal actions going on.

Unfortunately, just like the Internet Explorer business - any "remedy" will be too little, too late as it won't come until years after those businesses destroyed by Google have long since run out of money and gone.

* Nothing is free - when you use a Google service it is not free, it may be free (as in no monetary charge) to you, but that's only because to Google YOU are the product being sold !

** Bear in mind that an awful lot of people simply click the first result, and I believe there are stats showing that if you aren't on the first page (top ten results) then you might as well not exist to many.

Re: I would like to add...

> Climate science is ridiculously well funded, and yet not only can it not produce a workable model, but it cannot be used to improve our lives ...

More importantly, in some areas, "greenwash" may actually be making things worse. While it's not the same thing, the push for renewables is largely down to the warmageddon mongers warnings - so the rise in renewables subsidies* is really down to the political atmosphere driven by the climate scientists.

As far as I can tell, the subsidies paid out (year on year) for unreliable renewables amount to the cost of building a new nuclear power station every 2-3 years. Given that only a couple of new nuclear plants could replace the typical annual output of the windmills, but be able to provide power when it's needed, not just when "the right sort of wind" is blowing, suggests that syphoning all that money off into windmills (which cannot in any way contribute to any requirement to keep the lights on) may not have been a sensible decision.

* Walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck - so therefore it must be a cat. That seems to be the argument by many that the renewables subsidies aren't actually subsidies.

Re: Shutters?

> What shutters*?

The ones that are integral to all BS1363 (aka "13A")sockets and must be there to comply with the spec. IIRC the method of operation is not specified and there are a number of different operating modes, but no BS1363 socket should allow anything to be poked into the line or neutral receptacles without the earth pin being inserted first.

In many designs, the earth pin simply pushes a plate down an uncovers the holes. In some better designs, the earth pin unlocks things, but it still needs both line and neutral pins to push on the shutter for it to open - the latter is to avoid the "shove the cam down with ${random small device} and stick the wires in" option that's possible with the more basic designs.

As an aside, the dimensions for the holes are not specified. The size of the pins of the plug are specified, and the socket is required to cope with that (with a set tolerance). There is also some interesting, and frightening, information on the Fatally Flawed website.

Re: One small problem with all this....

> One possible solution, could be to slice and dice the data into three encrypted chunks in the country where it is collected and ...

The problem with that is that it only addresses storage of the data. The underlying problem is that the data is (in many cases) being exported (or at least, put "under the control" of someone who can be compelled to export it) in order to process it.

So, taking an example someone else has raised, the school that outsources it's admin systems to a US controlled company has a problem. It's no good encrypting and then exporting part of the data - the admin software can't then do anything with it.

Re: Not in my name... @Simon Hobson

> So on the pretence of giving consumers greater choice etc. the primary objective is to make it cheaper (for them) to target BT's more profitable business customers

That's an aspect that hadn't occurred to me. Perhaps that could be offset by some form of "you can share the ducts & poles, but that comes with a universal service obligation" trade ?

Re: If a 'Doctrine' has ...

> how much reliance can be placed on government 'guidelines' or 'guidance'?

None at all, absolutely none, and never has been.

> The problem is that even if Microsoft has stuff stored in Europe the US courts can demand that their Ireland Branch produces the data without due process ...

And in this case, you need to look a bit deeper.

AIUI, Microsoft recognised this train crash was coming along - some time in advance. They have structured things so that the datacentre in Ireland is operated by an EU based company and with access restrictions that prevent the US company staff from directly accessing the data. AT least, that's how I've been reading things.

So regardless fo the outcome of the legal case, Microsoft US cannot hand over the data as they simply can't access it. The bosses there can "instruct" the management over in the EU to hand it over, but of course will get a blunt "no, that would be illegal" response. In effect, the very worst that MS US can do is start firing managers of the EU business unit - but if they try that then they'll quickly find out about "unfair dismissal" laws as well !

So if MS lose the case, the TLA still don't get the data, but the US makes itself look even more foolish. I suppose it also means that the EU managers refusing to break the law will also have to forego ever setting foot within US jurisdiction for the rest of their lives as well since I guess the same idiot judge would probably file a warrant for contempt of court against them.

Really, the US government, TLAs, and courts need to find a way to back down on this before it blow up big time in their face.

It's a very different situation from a US based company directly owning/operating, and having access to a datacentre that just happens to be located in the EU.

> They might as well just ban non electric cars

Not practical - especially in cities ! The very characteristics of a city (high population density) also makes cars you have to plug in impractical (the vast majority of owners don't have somewhere to park where they can plug in). But even if you lined all the roads with charging points, it still couldn't work - where "couldn't" rally means no-one would be prepared to pay even a fraction of the cost ...

> Long-term it's likely to happen in cities

Doubt it ...

There is this teensy little problem that even if we had the generating capacity (we don't, because hippies and tree huggers have been so against building sensible capacity - ie nuclear) we wouldn't be able to transport it to the point of use. In many parts the power distribution is close to maxed out - they had to install a lot of new capacity to keep the lights on for the Olympics ! Add a lot of electric vehicles and the network would collapse - and the cost of upgrading it would be "quite significant. Not just in cash terms, but also in "dig the streets up for months" terms as well.

Financially and politically impractical until things change somewhat !

> If that electricity comes from sustainable sources, that’s fine and dandy.

Ballcocks. When you plug in ANY electric load, and I really do mean any, in this country the result is that the "taps open" a bit on a fossil fuelled power station. Our nuclear fleet (what's left of it) just runs flat out and I believe doesn't even meet baseload at night now. Renewables get special (expensive) treatment and get to supply all they can produce. And fossil fuels make up the rest - coal for the bulk of it, a load of CCGT for more baseload, and OCGT for the load following - and also compensating for the crap windmills.

So when you plug in the car, it WILL cause the taps to open on a fossil fuel station - most likely gas. No ifs or buts, that's a "will". So your lecky car is, for the forseeable future in the UK, gas powered !

Re: One option

> Could US companies move ALL of their data processing to the EU, and thereby protect US citizens from all encompassing data grabs by TLAs?

NO, that doesn't work. If the data is still "under the control of" the US company then it's still "up for grabs" by the US TLAs. There also needs to be a corporate structure in place making the data physically inaccessible to the US based company - see the Microsoft Ireland case for an example of how that might work.

Re: European Commission daft – official

> The only thing that big cloud players can do to keep EU data under EU privacy law is to keep it in EU data centers.

That alone is not sufficient.

If the company is US based, then any data stored anywhere in data centres it has control of is "fair game" to the US authorities. Hence why the argument that Enron could have escaped having some stuff found out by hosting stuff overseas is complete rubbish - the men in crisp suits knock on the door, hand the officers a bit of paper, the officers hand over the data or go straight to jail.

This is the basis of the Microsoft case. Here, Microsoft in the US do not directly control the data centre in Ireland - that is a separate legal entity managed by people in the EU and subject to EU law. Since Microsoft US doesn't (I assume given the effort they've put into the corporate structure) have access to the data, they can only instruct the officers of another company (albeit wholly owned) to hand it over - to which the answer is "No, it would be illegal to do so".

Re: I can see only one solution to this

> Which is enforceable how? You can't stop, e.g. Google selling over the internet to EU-based customers.

Oh really ?

EU to Google - obey our laws or else.

Google - or what ?

EU - issues arrest warrants for Google execs in EU and they are charged with data protection offences (for which they don't really have any defence now).

EU - if that doesn't work, orders ISPs to block Google "properties"

So firstly, when the EU management resign en-masse it's hit Google - they do have considerable business presence in the EU which would grind to a halt without staff. Lets face it, would you work for a foreign manager telling you to break the law when the authorities are just watching for the next person to arrest ? So it's not just a case of changing it so middle managers in Ireland report to a senior manager in the US.

Blocking Google altogether would hurt the EU - but not half as much as it would hurt Google. Bear in mind that Microsoft fought the "abuse of dominance" stuff so hard not because of the direct financial benefit - but because they were desperate to keep their "everything Microsoft or it doesn't work" lock-in. If Google lost it's EU business, that would be a massive, massive dent in it's dominance. Do you think their competitors wouldn't be ready with "helpful instructions" on how to switch to using a non-Google service ?