* Posts by SImon Hobson

2539 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2006

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

As I recall, that was deliberate.

I'm sure any of us who've ever worked with serial connections will be familiar with the old problem of the number of permutations of connections needed to get things working. With that clever arrangement, you could (in theory) use the same cable for a modem or a printer just by turning the plug the other way round - transmit and receive were diagonally opposite, turning the plug round swapped the transmit and receive connections for both data and control lines.

Doggy DNA database adopted by Gloucestershire cops to bring crims to heel

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Sounds great - as long as the criminals don't think to just sell the dogs away from their homes. As already mentioned, it would need to be a national scheme to be of widespread use.

Of course, it only works if there's already doubt about the ownership of a dog. If everything looks legit*, then there won't be a question and the dogs DNA would never be checked against the database.

*Heaven forbid that the less stupid criminals might actually get paperwork (apparently) in order and stuff like that. I read of a case where a dog had been with a different family for some years before anyone realised that it's chip number didn't match the paperwork. The dog came from what appeared to be a genuine seller, it had paperwork, was chipped and registered - expect that the paperwork was faked, and the chip number didn't match.

It should help with the more stupid criminals that get caught with what are clearly not their own pets in the van ...

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

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Re: Hydrogen

Indeed, and not only that, but if you use synthetic hydrocarbons then you could ... oooh, I dunno ... perhaps just use that in the existing rolling stock and supply network ? There is already a load of rolling stock that runs on hydrocarbons, and all the infrastructure to feed it - start mixing in synthetic hydrocarbons and it gets greener without massive capital expenditure on new stock and distribution.

The same applies to cars - hydrogen is a crap fuel by comparison.

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Re: Oh great!

The outer fabric covering was highly flammable and easily ignitable - though I don't think it was thermite. It would have gone up the same way even if it didn't have any hydrogen on board.

Nominet is back to 'the same old sh*t' says Public Benefit campaign chief as EGM actions grind to halt

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Re: "the company must be run on a commercial basis"

Remember that it's been laid down that “No man in the country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel in his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow, and quite rightly, to take every advantage which is open to it under the Taxing Statutes for the purposes of depleting the taxpayer's pocket. And the taxpayer is in like manner entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Inland Revenue” Lord Clyde, 1929.

If the rules allow you to legally not pay more tax, then those are the rules. There are too many idiots about making a lot of noise about people legally arranging their affairs within the law so as to minimise the size of the tax shovel. If they think avoided tax should have been paid, then the correct thing to complain about is the rules that permit that avoidance.

Post-lunch snooze plans dashed as the UK tests its Emergency Alerts... again

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I guess it'll work really well then for ... oh, how about a small area of flooding in Lancaster. Oh wait - the power went off and the mobile networks stopped working.

See One city’s experience of coping with loss of power(PDF). It's a good read and should be mandatory reading for anyone with even a passing interest in resilience planning. Among the "if it's not on Faecesborg then it didn't happen" generation, it must have been quite a shock to find that mobiles don't work without power both for the phone and the infrastructure that gets an Internet connection to it.

Monitoring is simple enough – green means everything's fine. But getting to that point can be a whole other ball game

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where if something breaks and stops working then everything to the right of it will also be down, you only want to be alerted to the most critical item that's down on the left

Nagios does that out of the box provided you tell it which items depend on which other items. It's far from perfect since it assumes that if (say) there's two links between ${somethings} then "either link up" == "${somethings can talk to each other}". But it does exactly what's described - it will send an alert for the mother item, but only flag the child items on the console.

At one time (at my last job) I had monitoring for each individual site hosted on our web servers after a SNAFU led to a situation with lots of sites being served up by a default config which happened to be one client's site. If the site itself was bad (fetch of a page didn't return a particular string) then that would get flagged up, but of the server went down, then while sites would slowly turn red on te console, they'd not result in emails being sent.

The biggest problem I had was a) no manglement support to monitor anything, b) no budget, c) no support from colleagues so I literally had to detect changes by seeing when I didn't have all-green and working out what had been changed. But the hell-desk did actually like it as a quick reference for when the phones started ringing.

Final guidance on Schrems II ruling: Data from EU could be held up if a third country lets authorities access it

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Re: How long has this been going on?

Yes, but it took several years to reach the point of Privacy ShieldFigleaf getting struck down. As already pointed out, we can look forward to another version, which is patently unfit but will keep the data moving for another few years while a Shrems III case grinds it's way through the system.

Now, what it needs is for a case to be brought which punishes ${somescapegoat} for data transfers which broke the law - even if it was within the guidelines at the time or even the Safe Harbour, Privacy ShieldFigleaf, whatever the current incarnation is. Because as long as people can get away with breaking the law simply because they can point at something official that says acting illegally is legal, then it'll carry on.

The thing is, the law is the law, and it's fairly clear. Guidance is just that, agreements are just that - in theory they cannot over-ride the law.

Trouble is, for it to send a real message, somescapegoat needs to be one of the big "professional criminal" type organisations like Faecesborg - but they have the wherewithal to fight things all the way. In practice, it would be some small outfit that can't afford the legal clout to truly look behind what they are being sold by the big outfits.

Mensa data spillage was due to 'unauthorised internal download'

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Re: Wow

... what IQ tests are actually measuring

They measure your ability to do IQ tests !

There are different tests, but the ones I know of generally have a selection of different areas they test - some language, some numerical, some spacial, some logical. So basically a cross section of stuff people might need to comprehend or "do" in life - but clearly different vocations lean towards different skills requirements.

You might find https://www.assessmentday.co.uk useful as an indicator of the different types of tests that exist. An IQ test is basically a weighted sum of a load of different aptitude tests.

BT sues supplier for £72m over exchange gear that allegedly caused wave of ADSL outages

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Having worked with the sort of IDC termination systems commonly used in phone networks, including plenty of 237A disconnect blocks (which is what I imagine this story is about, or something very similar) I would expect them to be steel in order to get the right springiness. Something like copper would not have the right mechanical properties. I would expect the steel to be plated in order to minimise corrosion.

I could speculate that the problem is the contacts that are closed when a test connector is not inserted. The contact pressure is probably a lot less than that between the wires and the IDC terminations, so it's quite conceivable that corrosion could occur there and create a bad joint - which would disappear when testing the line as inserting a test connector would wipe the surfaces clean. I've come across a number of such test points that have been damaged (I speculate by shoving incorrectly sized objects like screwdrivers into them asa bridging tool), and hence the block needed to be jumpered across to bypass these damaged contacts.

For the un-initiated (if they are still reading), the 237A disconnect block has 10 circuits, 2 wires (one pair) each - and it's called "disconnect" because inserting a test probe disconnects the circuit. Connections from (e.g.) the exchange equipment would be connected to one side, and the connections to the subscribers' lines would be connected to the other. Normally, internal contacts pass the circuit from one side to the other, but a test probe can be inserted which a) opens the contacts and thus splits the circuit, and b) gives access to the connections of one side. So at the exchange, you could insert the test probe, disconnecting all the wiring from the exchange, and thus test the exchange port. Insert the test probe the other way round, and you disconnect the line from the exchange and can test the wiring downstream.

There will be multiple points where this is possible. In the exchange itself, the exchange ports are terminated onto banks of them, and there's a 'kin big frame across which jumper wires can be routed to similar banks of connections that feed the multi-pair cables out to the green boxes. Then in the green boxes, the same thing happens on a smaller scale to route from the big multi-pair cables to smaller ones that feed up to the top of poles or to underground joints. And so, if the connector blocks are "defective", there's multiple points where this can cause a problem with services.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Perhaps the supplier had been able to identify the problem and came up with a solution that was quicker, easier, and cheaper to install than replacing all the blocks. it may not have been a fault with the block, it could have been faulty installation - I don't know, there's not enough in the article and I wasn't there.

But the supplier offering a fix doesn't mean that the supplier is at fault - only that they've identified a way around the problem, whoever caused it.

New York State Senate first to pass landmark right-to-repair bill – but don't go popping the Champagne just yet

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Re: Anyone remember Haynes Manuals?

Not surprisingly, Haynes have had to move into other areas - too few are interested in even checking their own oil levels these days to make manual production worth while. And I've tended to buy the manufacturer's official dealer manuals - Land Rover are happy to sell these to anyone.

I recall when they had instructions on how to overhaul everything - engines, gearboxes, differentials. Now (well actually, a decade or two ago when I last looked) they are full of "not a DIY job" notices where the overhaul sections used to be.

The Eigiau Dam Disaster: Deluges and deceit at the dawn of hydroelectric power

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Re: Unregulated free enterprise at its worst

Indeed. And of course, if the electrical safety standards weren't in place, you (or your employer) would be competing with vendors who had no qualms about shipping poor quality products - though these days it's arguable that such a situation does now exist with "cheap tat" from China.

UK launches consultation on forcing landlords to allow gigabit broadband upgrades

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Re: Leasehold, fleecehold

Englandshire should just get rid of the bizarre feudal/serf-like "leasehold" thing where flat-owners don't actually entirely own their flat

There would be serious problems with that - not least that you would not be able to get a mortgage on any flat !

But if we take a step back, even if you "own" the freehold, you don't technically own the land. I think it's still something like the Crown actually owns everything, but you have a perpetual licence to use it as if you really did own it - so in practical terms, no difference.

But as regards flats, or other similar structures. There needs to be "someone" who owns and maintains the whole building. Without that you would have a situation where if it falls down, then the ground floor owner needs to rebuild their bit, and when they've done that, the 1st floor owner can re-build their bit, and then the second floor owner can re-build their bit, ... and if you're on the 15th floor and any one of the ones below you doesn't rebuild for whatever reason, then you have nothing to build your flying freehold property on. Or looking from the other direction, you'd all be reliant on the top floor owner fixing the roof - if they don't then everyone else gets wet when the pans on the top floor get full. And that's why you will not get a mortgage on a flying freehold property.

So, the building will be owned by "someone", and they will lease parts of it (i.e. individual flats) to individual tenants. Under the conditions of the leases, the freeholder will be responsible to keeping the building in place (and rebuilding it if needed), while the leaseholders will be responsible for their own bits plus the shared costs of the shared bits.

This does actually work fine. I let a flat in a small development, we pay a nominal free to cover buildings insurance, and mostly we club together and organise our own maintenance. We'd actually run the management company ourselves except that when the original developer raised it, none of the leaseholders (I wasn't one at the time) we interested in taking it on.

Where it goes wrong are where the "someone" involved is there to make money rather than to service the building and it's occupiers. And that includes the scum who sell houses as leasehold and then ratchet up the service charges for no reason other than the unwitting buyers agreed to the service charges doubling every year (were their conveyancers asleep on the job as an explanation for not raising this ?). So what's needed is something doing about the scum who treat it as a cash machine rather than as a means to maintaining the building - such as the Edinburgh scheme another Regger has mentioned.

Seagate finds sets of two heads are cheaper than one in its new and very fast MACH.2 dual-actuator hard disks

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Hmm, I'm sure I can recall one manufacturer selling 3 1/2" drives back in the 90s with two sets of heads - because they'd reached the point where moving one set of heads about meant that they couldn't saturate the SCSI bus on random I/O loads.

Not that I could afford the drives, or a system capable of fully loading it :-(

Clearly a case of right, it's been long enough now, no one will remember the last time it was done - we can get away with calling this a new idea now !

VC's paper claims cost of cloud is twice as much as running on-premises. Let's have a look at that

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Re: Where do I start?

And of course the reliability of cloud is good - as exemplified by Microsoft and it's Office 365 364 363 362 361 ... what have they got down to so far this year ? You'd think that something run by the amount of skills M$ can throw at it ought to be very reliable.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: "Engineers are always more expensive than infrastructure," said Quinn

It comes down to scale

If you are a small operator, then you will find it expensive to employ the sorts of skills that are needed to provide a reliable and secure setup. In principle, the big cloud operators can buy all the skills needed - and top notch skills - in all areas and share those skills across all of their customers.

So as a small operator, it makes a lot of sense to use cloud - you will be using systems backed up by engineering and technical skills you can only dream about having in house. If you are a large operator, then you get the economies of scale that allow you to employ your own skilled people. Somewhere in between, I guess you're stuffed in that zone where cloud is expensive, but then so is getting in the right skills needed.

Microsoft sheds some light on perplexing Outlook blank email incident: Word was to blame

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Because it gave us the opportunity to format in some way and through this give improve meaning and context to email messages

Unfortunately, it also creates the situation where the sender gets to tell you how you'd like your email to appear - too bad if you find tiny blue text hard to read, that's your fault for expecting function to trunk form.

WhatsApp: Share your data with Facebook, or we'll make our own app useless to you

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Re: Please do!

Where are you ? If in Europe, or even the UK for now, then tell your boss he's breaking the law and if he persists you'll report him. If you're sacked for it, then that's straight to the tribunal for a guaranteed win for unfair dismissal.

Of course, to that does need a considerable level of self assertiveness and confidence - not to mention the ability to withstand being unemployed (potentially for a while given the current situation) so I would understand if you weren't brave enough to do it.

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Re: contacts?

So don't they need my consent, as well as yours, to even begin to think about slurping that data?

Yes, Faecesborg (and their various tentacles) must have your informed consent to legally hold and process your personal information - even if it's only your name. The person interacting with Faecesborg cannot give that consent even if they were asked for it - which they most definitely aren't being.

As I wrote above, I have a feeling that they are given the EU authorities the middle finger and effectively shouting "go on then, I don't think you've got the balls". It'll take many years (see how long Max Schrems has been at it), but given FB cannot possibly have any defence (even if it were a defence) of ignorance of GDPR, and it's clearly not accidental (in the way that Google's slurping of WiFi data was "accidental"), then eventually it's going to come down on FB like a ... 4% of global turnover fine.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Trouble is, all those so called "friends" will have given Faecesborg all the information on your that they want, and you don't want them to have.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Yes, under EU GDPR this is expressly illegal. No ifs or buts, it's is expressly illegal unless Faecesborg and all it's various bits gets the informed consent of EVERY person who's personal information is being hoovered.

Asking the person who's handing it over isn't enough - even if they were being asked (their not, they're being coerced). Only the data subject can give that consent.

It's not like GDPR is some sort of secret - even Faecesborg must have heard of it by now. So I see this as either a last ditch "grab everything while we can" like it's the Debenhams closing down sale - or it's them deliberately goading the EU authorities in a "go on, dare you" way on the basis that they (and their user base) are more powerful than the EU authorities. On that, if the EU decided on the nuclear option, there are others ready to step up and fill the void.

But at least now I have a good excuse if someone tells me that I "must" use Whatsapp - I'll simply tell them that it's illegal to use, and BTW "if you ask again I'll report you to the ICO for breaking privacy regulations" (which we do still have in the UK ... for now).

Facebook: Nice iOS app of ours you have there, would be a shame if you had to pay for it

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Maybe, maybe not.

But at the moment the advertisers only gets to advertise to the freeloaders - the ones who would join if and only if there were a paid option without the badness aren't there anyway.

I suspect the ral reason (or at least one of them) is that if Faecesborg did offer such an option, then there's the risk that their product (i.e. the users) might realise how badly they are being data mined when they meet up with a paying user and see the differences.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Me too. But now, if they did introduce a subscription option free of ads and tracking, then my response would be "seriously ? you expect me to trust you with that now ?"

Sadly, I can see the potential benefits of such systems - SWMBO uses it a lot and there's some interesting local history stuff (for example) posted on it. But given Faecesborg's track record, I'd never trust them now - they've comprehensively proved beyond all doubt that they are a bunch of lying (data) thieves.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Well it wasn’t free before

If only the regulators could understand that, and give Faecesborg a right reaming for deceptive claims - "it's not free now, never has been, and never will be" would be more accurate.

Copper load of this: Openreach outlines 77 new locations where it'll stop selling legacy phone and broadband products

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Re: We're moving house soon

It shouldn't be any problem for most people.

As I read things, there will still be FTTC available - which is copper to your house. If you are like the many that never plug a phone in then you'll see no difference at all. If you do need a phone service, that will be available, but will have a VoIP to analogue adapter in your home to make it work.

I haven't seen any technical details, but my best guess would be that they'll split the DSL into a couple of virtual circuits and provide a modem/router that can do the digital-analogue conversion, and prioritise the voice traffic so it will remain steady regardless of how much traffic you put through your internet connection. In practical terms, most users would not be able to tell the difference.

If there isn't built in provision for it, I suspect a supply of suitable battery backup units will appear to provide medium term backup should the mains go off - at least as long as the FTTC batteries hold up.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Re: Loss of power

For the benefit of anyone wondering "how does that work then ?", FTTC works like this :

Your phone line from the exchange, complete with line power from the exchange batteries, is routed from the green connection box to the FTTC box. In there, it is put through a filter which allows the DC and low frequency (voice) signal through, but blocks high frequency signals. The VDSL kit then adds the high frequency DSL signal to the line, and the whole lot is then routed back to the green cabinet and then out to your house.

If the power fails in the FTTC cabinet, the "phone line" is still there and it's almost as if there were not FTTC box involved. "Almost", because the line still passes through the filter in the FTTC box.

It's near enough the reverse of the situation in your own home, where the incoming line has the "phone" and "broadband" split by the filter, with the phone line being routed to whatever phones you plug in - which still work even if you pull the power on your broadband router.

US declares emergency after ransomware shuts oil pipeline that pumps 100 million gallons a day

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Re: Presumably the fuckwits in charge ...

have never worked with pipeline systems, but my guess would be that their is some need to extract billing and operating data from the product delivery system and probably some need to input some commands at times

It's the "need to input some commands" bit that's the problem.

A pipeline typically isn't just a long metal tube. Something like this will have valves, pumps, etc, etc which all need to be correctly operated - e.g." don't run pump A unless valve B and valve C are open, and valve D is shut" sort of thing. And of course, the operators need to be able to see what state everything is in before commanding any changes. Get it wrong as you risk over-pressuring a pipe (potential for burst), dead-heading a pump (bad for the pump), and many other things that (especially for a pipe carrying environment unfriendly materials) that can cause a bad day.

As already mentioned, the network controlling and monitoring this should be airgapped from all non-critical networks - and this is achievable if you put the effort into your network design. However, as Stuxnet proved, even this is not sufficient. Also, even if the actual SCADA system is OK, without the "general IT", you might not have access to the information needed such as what needs to be delivered to where.

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Re: Presumably the fuckwits in charge ...

IPv6 should have been encrypted from the very first glimmer of a concept in someone's mind.

Guess what, it was !

Then someone came along and wanted a feature that was incompatible with that. AIUI IPv6 still technically supports E2E encryption at the network level, but it's not widely implemented.

We were 'blindsided' by Epic's cheek, claims Apple exec on 4th day of antitrust wrangling

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Re: Try counting the copies...

Apple are right to insist on one system-wide HTML/CSS rendering engine

And that's a way to stifle development. Remember the days when Microsoft insisted you had to have IE6 as your browser, and gave it away free to kill off Netscape. We had a looooooooong period when f'all happened in terms of web development as once there was little choice, then there was no incentive for MS to work on it. And "the web" had to work with IE6 so there was little out there to cause users to demand "IE6 doesn't work with (something), please fix it MS".

OK, things are different now, but having one system wide rendering engine, especially when that can't be replaced, leads to a similar situation where wen site developers are forced to code to "what works in Safari on IOS" and things can only develop as whatever pace Apple can be bothered to improve the rendering engine.

If you allow competing rendering engines, the user can switch browsers when stuff doesn't work - and then it becomes obvious to the user when a browser isn't up to the job. "Site doesn't work in Safari, works in Chrome" - user can moan that Safari is rubbish and Apple have some incentive to fix it.

And just because "it's rubbish on Windows" doesn't mean it has to be rubbish everywhere. Lots of stuff is crap on Windows - perhaps some century they'll figure out how to handle shared libraries properly and the demand for multiple private copies will reduce.

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Re: Safari and Internet Explorer

Adobe Flash was banned from iOS because its wonderful rendering engine killed off the battery

That's not a security issue. That's an argument for the system having the facility to alert the user to applications that eat battery power - then the user can decide for themselves whether they want the battery power or to access the content they want to.

Seriously, over the years I've had no end of problems caused by vendors "we don't think you should use that because ..." when for the job I have in hand, doing what they have decided is verboten is exactly what I need. Admittedly that's caused by other f'wits creating UIs in (for example) Java that only runs with an older Java engine - but if your task is to (for example) reconfigure that network switch, and the tool you have to use to do it is "something", then it's far from helpful when you find some clueless f'wit other vendors has determined that you should not be allowed to run that tool, ever, at all. I've seen a number of situations where people have to keep old computers around just to do this sort of admin task.

If Apple allowed arbitrary browsers to have full control of the networking stack

Err what ? A browser wouldn't have control of the network stack, it would simply have the ability to make outbound connections using the system's network stack - just like every other application that does network connections. That's just a false claim pulled out of a rear orifice.

you'd end up with browsers like full-fat Chrome on iOS that use decidedly privacy-hostile web standards

Well a "full fat" alternative might be a useful thing to have, especially given Safari's reputation for not supporting the latest standards well/at all.

And Apple could still allow competing rendering engines while still having privacy rules. They set a rule along the lines of "though shalt not track users on our platforms" and kick the application off if it's not followed - like they do with lots of other applications. Having a "full fat" rendering engine and tracking users are two different things, you can have either without the other.

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Re: Safari and Internet Explorer

They also have to be very sure that any installed software doesn't compromise the security or performance of the platform.

You do realise that isn't an argument for not allowing competing browsers, don't you ?

Apple already vet software, and reject stuff it "doesn't like" - where "doesn't like" seems to come without rules or a need to tell the developer exactly what the alleged problem is. But that's not a reason to disallow a different rendering engine.

Put a browser in it's own sandbox, as all apps are, and it can more or less do what it likes while rendering pages - all without compromising the security of the system.

No, the ONLY reason for disallowing alternative rendering engines is their "nothing that competes with something we do" policy - which personally I think is anti-competitive.

Privacy activist Max Schrems on Microsoft's EU data move: It won't keep the NSA away

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And all this neatly ignores the fact that when you sign into a Microsoft services, your connections are bounced all over the world. Your data may be stored and processed in the EU (or UK) - but the keys to access that data most certainly don't !

And we know, as a fact, that the claimed legal separation (and supporting technical systems) that makes Microsoft US unable to access data stored in (say) Ireland is mere PR. How else with MS hand over data stored in Ireland to the US authorities the moment they were given the right paperwork after the CLOUD act was passed ?

Broadband plumber Openreach yanks legacy copper phone lines in Suffolk town of Mildenhall en route to getting the UK on VoIP

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Re: "Living Without Electricity" - Royal Academy of Engineering, 2016

You beat me to it with that link - sadly I can only upvote you the once.

It really is a good read, it's not full of jargon, and there's some really quite funny (if they weren't serious) bits.

But there are also mentions of things that I suspect few people have thought about. Does your mains water supply need power ? I know mine doesn't as United Utilities have designed the local network to be gravity fed - but in Lancaster they had tower blocks without water as they needed booster pumps to get water to the higher floors. In some places, they water provider relies on pumps to get water into towers, or just to boost the pressure.

Big right-to-repair win: FTC blasts tech giants for making it so difficult to mend devices

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Re: Injunctive relief

On the flip side, at a previous job one of the tasks I had was managing the "walkie talkie" radios used in the factory and warehouse. We had some, not the cheapest on the market, but not particularly expensive either - and they were well made.

I day I was handed one to sort out - it had been dropped in a vat of candle wax ! Once I'd cleaned out the mic and speaker grills, and unstuck the knobs, it worked just fine. It was designed to be completely waterproof, but was easily taken apart to get at it's insides.

Glue is not needed to be waterproof, it's just one way of doing it which suits the manufacturers as it makes repairs harder and gets them more replacement sales.

On another occasion I got a radio back that really was beyond repair - it had an argument with a forklift wheel and the forklift won.

UK watchdog would cease to enforce data protection law if Supreme Court sided with Google, its lawyer tells judges

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Re: Agreed with ICO

True, but the end effect is exactly the same. If Google win this one, then the ICO will be largely powerless to do anything - because, as said, it would be very hard in most cases to prove a causal link between "bad guy did this, punter suffered that (damage)". Even if (for example) there's a mass leak of private information from a company that includes (say) all the information necessary for identity theft on a massive scale, and then there are loads of cases of identity theft and fraud immediately afterwards, unless you caught the fraudsters and they fessed up - it would be impossible to say that the identity theft occurred as a result of the data breach and could not have been as a result of any other data breach.

As it stands now, the company is on the hook for the data breach itself which is a fairly easy case to prosecute. If Google win this case, then the company will not be liable for any damages for the breach, and will be able to avoid any damages for the effects as it would simply be able to say "prove the identity theft wasn't triggered by something else" as a defence.

And so the ICO would effectively be powerless to enforce data protection law - simply because it would be virtually impossible to prove the causal link between data loss and victim damage.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

SImon Hobson Bronze badge

Except that most of the time there are no pedestrians around to be using the crossings. They just seem to be designed to hold stuff up.

SImon Hobson Bronze badge
WTF?

Sounds like you got the same special traffic lights we got up here ! Specially designed to show a green light to empty roads, but turn red when a car approaches.

Except for certain junctions where they put a mini roundabout because traffic lights would work too well. Being tiny, and busy, it can be hard spotting a gap in all the permutations of incoming traffic that you could be pulling out in front of - and when you spot one, you then find the car you've just slotted in behind has been blocked from exiting and the car you though you had a decent gap in front of starts blowing it's horn at you.

Spotlight on Apple, Google app stores: What happened to Tile, Spotify, Match – and that proposed law in Arizona

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Re: "Would you rather have two sewage networks in your neighborhood?"

Even comms networks aren't natural monopolies because is economically feasible to deploy more than one.

Actually, that's not the case. It's rarely economically feasible to deploy two competing networks, especially if one of them has a head start.

There are of course exceptions. It's viable to deploy a wireless (i.e. mobile phone) network alongside a wired network - they do different jobs. The only reason there are multiple mobile infrastructure networks is that in the early days they had some rules imposed on them.

But taking (e.g.) the market for wired internet access, it's rarely viable to install a second network to compete with an incumbent - as history has shown.

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Re: Third-party app store

Yes, the vast majority of users would be unable (or unwilling*) to do it. It may be hard for some of us to understand, but in these forums we're a self selected bunch that probably barely reaches a rounding error in user numbers for Google.

* Unwilling, as in they'd be scared off by the "world will end in a sea of malware" warnings they'd have to click through to enable it.

India appoints ‘IP Guru’ to push nation towards IPv6

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Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

Yes, SLAAC is still there and is the default. But SLAAC is NOT the thing you are complaining about. SLAAC can use a number of address generation algorithms, the one using the MAC address is long deprecated and shouldn't be seen in the wild now (unless you are running very ancient unpatched software, or have deliberately misconfigured things). The recommended method these days is to generate, and change, the self assigned address randomly.

And yes, it's logical to prefer IPv6 over IPv4 when both are available. That's the way you get traffic to move to IPv6 where both ends are IPv6 enabled. Incidentally, at my last place I put IPv6 on our internal LAN without mentioning it to anyone - using a tunnel via HE. For a while I restricted it to my own laptop, then decided to see how others found it. Interestingly I heard no complaints (I could hear most people if they were shouting at their computers, small office) and left it turned on.

Bugs in implementations (and still using MAC derived addresses would be a bug), well that's a different matter.

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Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

leaked

As in "leaked", last tense of "to leak". That is no longer a valid criticism as it's been deprecated for a long time, and if you have something running old enough code to be still using it, then you may have some other (bigger) issues to worry about.

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Re: Time to give up on IPv6?

But it should be pretty obvious by now that there is a LOT of resistance to implementing it. Could be there are reasons for that.

Yes, a number of reasons ...

First among them is a general tendency to not want to learn anything new, which is similar to generally resisting change. Neither are inherently bad, both are natural responses to change.

Then you have people in the "supply chain" (ISPs etc) who aren't supporting it for their users and thus making it hard for users to adopt it.

And businesses/corporates who are desperately trying not to spend a penny more than they have to on what I'm sure many bean counters consider an irrelevance.

And of course, equipment vendors who haven't all been quick to provide working and bug free implementations.

But most of all, many people (some of them voicing their opinions here) feel that "there's nothing that needs fixing". Well actually, yes there is. Anyone that properly understands networking knows that there are real problems - which are being hidden my masses of digital duct tape (someone above mentioned standard libraries for working through NAT) which are often successful in hiding the problems sufficiently well that users don't see them.

Some of us have been in the industry long enough to remember the days when this "complicated IP stuff" was making it's way outside of academia and governments. "What do we need that for" would be a common question from people happy with their walled gardens (e.g. AOL) or dial up bulletin boards. Some day we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

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Re: and

Indeed, and proof (not that any was needed) that having a body with the ability to do this with no independent oversight is "a bad idea".

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

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Re: It's about time...

I'd disagree with that. Virgin used to run our nearest main line - and did a very nice job of it.

We got fresh new trains, and in partnership with the rail people (whatever they're called this week) got some nice upgrades, and the Virgin managed stations were nice places to be for a change.

So far (or at least, as of a little over a year ago when I last went anywhere) nothing seems to have changed with the change to ... err ... what are they called again ? But then I'd not expect anything to change quickly.

How do we stamp out the ransomware business model? Ban insurance payouts for one, says ex-GCHQ director

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Re: How hard is it ...

At a previous job, we had lots of backups (we did a nightly backup of the live ERP system, and kept these for several months, and larger weekly backups of the whole system that were kept for longer) - offsite, kept for a long time. This was in the days of tape - DAT and SL? respectively IIRC, that'll date it !

After I'd left, the new admin got a surprisingly large sum of money budgeted, and a surprisingly large discount from Dell - so setup a VMware system, and I was called in to help migrate the old ERP system running atop SCO OpenServer on an out of support IBM system to a VM on the new setup.

Backups changed from being to tape, stored off-site, with many iterations to ... live snapshots of the VM stored on the same disk arrays as the live VM.

So yeah, basically not a lot of backup if the building burns down, the array fails, the hardware is stolen, ...

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Re: bring the problem back into cyberspace

I fear there's an immaturity in assessing the risk on the underwriting side and a fatal lack of qualified and experienced professionals to

Add to that, you get situation like I had a few jobs back. We had an assessment from someone - I can't remember now whether it was our parent company, the auditors, the insurers, or someone else. We in IT weren't told about it, or offered the opportunity to respond to their queries - we only found out afterwards when we got a list of technical things our manglement had agreed that we'd do (in a "we normally expect to see ...", "OK, we'll do it then", box ticking exercise), some of which were not supported by our systems.

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Facepalm

Yes, that 'kin evil system that a) slows everything down massively, and b) makes it 'kin difficult to work out what the actual URL is. For good measure, it also makes it a PITA for support when a URL "doesn't work" and you have to work out what it is that doesn't work !

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Facepalm

Re: Not a firewall - a content filter.

Yeah, Outlook is a 'kin security "this is how to actively not help the user" example. It does actually show links if you hover over them (I think, my work laptop is shut down and it's the only place I am forced to use Outlook). But it puts finding the actual email address behind a "friendly" name (from memory) a couple of clicks and a hover away - not "hover and there it is".

So how can you blame users for sending an email to fred_the_criminal@gmail.com instead of fred_in_accounts@company.com when Outlook actively makes it hard for the user to see that "Fred" is not actually "Fred" ?

I've had my boss accidentally email me work stuff at my personal email address - before I started the job, we conversed using my personal email. So my name is in his autocomplete with two different email addresses - and as mentioned above, Outlook goes out of it's way to hide the difference.

It's a bit like the real email address being in a locked filing cabinet, in a disused lavatory, with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard !

Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful, files complaint in France

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Re: "Freedom in this case means that you can modify the software"

No, it is you who doesn't get it - even when it's been explained several times to you.

If free and open software didn't exist, then MS would probably still "own" the desktop - and Internet Exploder would probably still be "the one and only web browser", yada, yada, yada. Yes, I know things have changed, but lets stay in the context for a moment.

We've seen exactly how things work when one player has too much control of a market - and if the players have similar interests, it can work when there are 2 or more dominant players as well. Microsoft of the 80s and 90s was dead against standards - because standards allow the user choice, and user choice means you don't own them (hence why MS put so much effort into knobblinng Open Document Standards). We saw exactly what that meant when MS was at it's peak - blatant abuse of it's position so that users did not have choice. So you say that users have freedoms - they choose to use Windows because it works for them. Well that's a false argument - in a truly free environment that would be a valid argument, but it still isn't because MS still has significant market dominance on the desktop. In the corporate world, people use Windows because MS has engineered it so that it's "difficult" not to. In a free world, many of those businesses would still use Windows, but at the moment many use it simply because it's "too hard" not to - because MS's dominance from the 80s and 90s has still not been adequately reigned in.

Let me give you a specific case ... How many alternatives are there to running a Windows server to run your network of Windows desktops ? Can't think of many ? Perhaps you can't think of any ? That's because when there were alternatives, MS used dirty tricks to kill off any competition. Once they had near 100% control of the Windows server market, they were then able to leverage that to make it really hard to use non-Windows desktops - or at the very least, distort the market in their favour. This isn't conjecture, they were found guilty of it and that's why they were eventually forced to document their network protocols and make that documentation available on a fair basic to anyone. But because their position was so entrenched, they still have that dominant position today.

So one of the freedoms people talk about is that they can choose to run (say) a Windows server, or they can choose to run a different server and still have the network work. That way, MS have to compete and provide something that people think it's worth paying for, rather than provide the most rubbish crap they think they can get away with given that many people don't really have any choice.

And that sort of freedom only happens if there's a working marketplace with multiple viable offerings. And that's why the likes of MS, and now Google, and Amazon, all put so much effort into blocking that free market as much as they can get away with - and they have got away with a lot of illegal activities because authorities around the world have been far too slow to take action. Unfortunately, by the time action is taken, and in particular any corrective measures imposed, the damage is already done - typically the competition has long since gone out of business.