* Posts by Roland6

10619 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2010

Huawei set to exit server, storage, networking business in the UK

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Smartphone business is on the way out

The restriction on Huawei seems to be on the usage by silicon foundries of US sourced software (and thus subject to US export licencing) in the design of chips and production control on their contracts with Huawei.

So the way around this will be to develop such programs which don't require US export licences.

Plus given how murky company ownership can be, Huawei could do a Nokia and 'exit' the phone business, so that some other entity (Microsoft in Nokia's case) can produce and sell 'Huawei' phones...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: So, how was it that

> So Trump banned them from competing.

But allowed them to continue to participate in Standards making, ie. contribute their IP...

Microsoft: We're getting rid of Flash by the end of the year - except you can still use it

Roland6 Silver badge

"And Microsoft plans to make Flash Player loadable through its browser plug-in interface."

So back to how things were at the beginning when Flash, Shockwave etc. were third-party plug-in's....

With a million unwanted .uk domains expiring this week, Nominet again sends punters pushy emails to pay up

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I feel left out

>As a result of yet another cock-eyed misinterpretation of the GDPR

Remember all the fuss about WhoIs determining what registrations were and weren't personal and the policies put out by Nominet about their hoovering up of PII that wasn't compliant with GDPR, so many ISPs simply withheld PII from Nominet...

@Andy Non

Do you know if removing the privacy flag is global though, i.e. so anyone can have access to my contact info or just Nominet?

No this flag only affects what gets sent to Nominet.

Obviously, once the new email address in 123-Reg has been around for a few hours, you'll then be able to create a new Nominet account using this email address and set up a few contact fields that aren't available via the 123-reg console.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I feel left out

>Apparently I can't update it either as my domains are held by 123-reg and it is up to them to update Nominet - a process that apparently is supposed to be automatic.

No, the process isn't totally automatic, 123-reg as a result of GDPR don't automatically pass what could be PII data to Nominet. You need to call 123-Reg and ask them explicitly to remove the privacy flag from your 123-reg registration records to enable the automatic data exchange with Nominet, then wait a few hours.

Don't remember seeing it documented on 123-Reg website, but Nominet UK support told me what the problem was when I encountered it last year.

There’s no new normal coming for PC sales, just the boring old normal of a long, slow decline

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Mature Market

Well, there is the potentially disruptive child around that could accelerate the decline.

I know of one large PC user who gave all their staff Raspberry Pi's to take home - it having an RDS Client and web browser installed; all that is necessary to access cloud-based corporate systems...

UK govt: It's time to get staff back into the office! Capita: Hey everyone... about that...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Well we all know what the governments concern is...

>My question is more about the domino effect in larger cities.

Well the fundamental issue is the extent to which that city relied on a daily influx of people.

As we are seeing in London and other major cities, much of the infrastructure and retail business has grown up to service the daily influx and not the local (resident) population.

A significant drop in the daily influx will expose the true position of cities, namely, they are dependent upon their hinterland. So with more people staying in the dormitory towns means there will be more opportunity for businesses there eg. use a hairdresser near to my home and not the one round the corner from work in another town/city.

Fundamentally, what we are seeing is the type of 'progress' being referred to in the saying "You can't stand in the way of progress", so the best approach is to adapt and change; but don't expect the change to be without casualties or pain.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Well we all know what the governments concern is...

>I'm not so sure that this is the issue - the Unions are pushing a similar line to support workers.

I suspect the unions see home working as a threat to their traditional power-base. Strikes become something quite different when you don't have large offices where a supervisor can exert influence and control and get everyone to adopt group think and down tools etc.

> The majority of ElReg readers can work from home but that doesn't reflect the larger reality, particularly amongst support services or retail.

Having teenagers I've been looking at this slightly differently. Given what we now know about CoViD-19, I suggest the best candidates for roles that require interaction with large numbers of the general public are young people.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Well we all know what the governments concern is...

>Large commercial landlords staring into the abyss if large companies reduce the size of there offices

I wonder how segmented the commercial sector is, ie. are those who own lots of office space the same ones as those who have been building warehousing.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Isn't it ironic

>From what I can see, it is simple as long as you stay resident in the UK. If you stay resident, you get paid and taxed via PAYE as normal, regardless of where in the world you physically are at that point.

Just need to watch out for double taxation, I seem to remember places like Ireland will tax you if you are there for more than 9 months continuously.

>However I am happy to be corrected if someone can give me a link to what legal/tax issues a company has if its employees decide to work from another country.

Well the issues I encountered were down to more practical matters:

- Forget about working (at home) on any project requiring security clearance.

- Expect to have to pay out of your own pocket travel expenses to a designated base office in the UK.

- Expect not to be offered on-site work where it is cheaper and quicker to get someone more locally based.

- Expect to have to work the UK 'office' hours normal for the company you are employed by.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Isnt that good?

>However, it involves taxing the money from the people who saved it - well-paid workers, upper management, and companies themselves - and giving it to the people who lost out.

Now, go check out the results of the last several elections and consider the likelihood of this actually happening.

Given what Rishi Sunak is rumoured to be considering, we might be in for a surprise!

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Isnt that good?

>keeping your home at a reasonable temperature 24/7 probably won't cost that much more than letting it go cold during the day and then heating it back up in the evening.

My son has discovered that an Xbox One, if used for a few hours with the window and door closed can comfortably heat his bedroom to a temperature that is significantly warmer than the rest of the house...

Google, Amazon pass on UK Digital Services Tax by hiking ad prices, fees at same rate the government takes

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: 20 years ago

>Heck, have all websites have a mandatory link (plain HTML, ...) to said site, clearly marked Advertising, and watch the net be free again.

Like having a domain name of the form: xyz.advertising (or xyz.advertising.uk) ?

I'm sure Nominet would happily provide and administer such a domain ...

Party like it's 2004: Almost a quarter of Windows 10 PCs living with the latest update

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: But it bricks dell computers!

Had a couple of HP desktops where the update lost the NIC and the USB drivers... Not having a blank CD available (W10 could see the default CD-ROM drive), making the drivers available so that W10 could find them was fun...!

Someone's getting a free trip to the US – well, not quite free. Brit bloke extradited to face $2m+ cyber-scam charges

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: It's only money...

>What about a Trade embargo on foreign owned golf courses.

Seems the sort of blackmail the current US administration has become notorious for.

UK government should recommend sale to Sports Direct (I think their owner may have donated to the Conservative party)...

Roland6 Silver badge
Pint

Re: It's only money...

>Taking DTs personal* property?

Apply the DT (China) logic:

DT's Golf course is controlled by the US government because it is owned by the President of the US. Last time I looked the President is a member of the US government and a US citizen, therefore the taking of the property is fully justified. :)

Supreme Court rules against Huawei in long-rolling Unwired Planet patent sueball: Take the licence terms we set or else

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Standards

>It would mean scrapping the current global patent system and starting from scratch.

It wouldn't require changing the patent system, just the Standards based FRAND add-on.

As demonstrated by the Sewing Machine Co-operative, there is no reason why the Standards body shouldn't negotiate the FRAND rate with ALL patent holders and then act as a clearing house; anyone wanting to implement a Standard need only pay the (published) royalty rate to the Standards body who then forward appropriate amounts to patent holders.

Yes, I know companies like to have special agreements and obfuscate amounts actually paid and not pay twice for things, but they would rapidly adapt to the new system; which would also have the advantage of facilitating the implementation of an IP tax...

Oh dear, what a pity! It seems you can't join the directors at the Zoom meeting today

Roland6 Silver badge
Pint

Zoom - Not done badly...

Given the number of users they had back in January (pre-CoVid19) and the speed of their ramp up, it has been a little surprising that we haven't seen more problems arising out of their rapid scaling of service.

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: make deletion routine

>Unless you need it on...

Which typically happens just after you finish the chat...

Roland6 Silver badge

Accidential...

Looks like the sort of accident that will have some senior people taking a deep breathe and popping the champagne corks...

Bletchley Park Trust can’t crack COVID-caused revenue slump without losing staff

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I'm sure they are trying

>But why haven't they hit YouTube. The computing museum part appears to have a channel yet last updated 4 months ago. Why haven't they been using social medium to get their message out there.

Probably because the relevant staff have been furloughed.

Whilst the furlough scheme has saved outgoings, one of the conditions is that staff can not be doing the job they would normally get paid for; however, they can volunteer elsewhere... So in some respects TNMC needed to get some volunteers to enhance their social media profile and help write funding bids...

Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to turn customized iPod into 'Geiger counter'

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Apple should launch this for the public.

I was referring to the observation "Apple should launch this as a product" ie. they should release an iPhone/iPod in 2020 with this functionality, rather than let people who want it, purchase a third-party add-on for sub £50 from Amazon.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Apple should launch this for the public.

Beaten to it by Softbank who launched the Pantone 5 phone with built-in radiation sensor back in 2012...

Obviously, with Fukushima in 2011, Japan was an obvious market for personal/pocket geiger counters - ether standalone or smartphone attached, that uploaded data and so permitted the creation of radiation heat maps.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: re-thinking the priorities of including this NTFS driver in the base kernel

And the worst case: a high performance Linux-based server system that actually READS AND STORES DATA using NTFS. Seriously, why would anyone be using *THAT* INSTEAD of ZFS or even EXT4???

Well given the general direction of travel...

Microsoft Windows (Linux) - it would allow an install over a pre-existing WIndows install....

Which raises the question of whether the (existing) Linux community should be enabling this to happen or whether it is something that should be left to MS...

SAP blogger reveals top tips for keeping clients happy: Don’t swear, remember to write a pithy subject line, and TURN OFF CAPS LOCK

Roland6 Silver badge

A friend has made a good living these past 15+ years, simply dusting down her old customer care material from the 90's and presenting it to a new generation of call centre managers and operators, it does seem that common sense is easily forgotten...

ANPR maker Neology sues Newcastle City Council after failing to win 'air quality' snoopcam project bid

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Procurement nightmares

Or the sales people really can' be arsed (sounds like this one) and rather than answer the questions they just supply reams of pdfs, often hundreds of pages long, and just say the answer is in the attached. Somewhere. Probably.

From the article I suspect this is what happened here, namely the Neology sales team's answer didn't completely answer the ITT question, whereas the Siemen's one did. The ITT would have been initially assessed on the (typically number of letters/words limited) responses rather than on the supplementary information.

Huawei Matebook X Pro 2020: Nothing too crazy but at least it's more fixable and cheaper than comparable Apple wares

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Like comparing an apple with a watermelon

Or put a (whole) watermelon in your lunch box...

eBay won't pass UK Digital Service Tax costs on to third-party sellers – unlike Amazon, which simply can't afford it

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: How convenient

>This article is about Amazon passing the tax on to the other companies who sell through Amazon.

What is not clear is how the monies are accounted for.

It would not surprise me if Amazon and Ebay handle and thus account for monies differently, so in Ebay's case by using PayPal they only receive the commission payment, not the full payment, resulting in a lower taxable turnover figure...

We have bad news for non-US Microsoft fans: The incoming Surface Duo is underspecced, overpriced, and over there

Roland6 Silver badge

We have GOOD news for non-US Microsoft fans: The incoming Surface Duo is underspecced, overpriced, and over there

FTFY

Suspect ElReg headline writers were trying to be ironic, but failed...

Irony, thy name is SANS: 28k records nicked from infosec training org after staffer's email account phished

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Eh, what?

Just looked back through my machine, my mailbox rule have deleted the original spam email...

But my web browsing records indicate it was received on the 18-Mar (lockdown started 16-Mar).

Also, I didn't register for the virtual DFIR Summit.

However, as my account was just for my email communications preferences (with no option to change the password), I suspect Sans don't know the full extent of the breech....

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Eh, what?

Only discovered on 6th August 2020...

I'll need to look back through my mail archive as it was some months ago (pre-UK lockdown) that I received a scam email that disclosed the password I only used for SANS...

Can't remember if I sent an email/complete a contact us webform notifying SANS of a potential breech...

Police face-recog tech use in Welsh capital of Cardiff was unlawful – Court of Appeal

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Well now...

>Yes, that is what testing does, before it is put into public use. You know, making sure the damned thing works reliably

However, showing from test data that "the damned thing works reliably" doesn't necessarily require any assessment of "racial and/or gender bias".

Also from a project decades back, we found that the only reliable test data set was real-world data (think records on 40M+ individuals) as this contained many quirks which permitted assessment of omissions and bias. Fortunately, the client was an organisation with access to real-world data sets of that size, without that access the system would have gone live having only been tested against a few hundred records, many of which were manufactured specifically for testing...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: weasel words

>Putting a sign saying "We are recording"

Well there are two issues here.

Firstly the use of CCTV, which is typically recorded and facial recognition image processing which isn't - unless you are wanting to train the system or gain metrics on the accuracy of the system.

It is thus debatable whether the facial recognition system is actually 'recording' if the video feed is being processed in real-time.

We should also remember that to arrest someone, the results of the facial recognition processing have to be presented to a human, the question arises as to when the human compares the output to the actual target list and so is able to rule out many false positives before someone is actually stopped.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Well now...

>The fact that they don't even know the degree of racial and/or gender bias is bad enough.

However, to obtain this data they would have to retain all images captured and manually assess them...

Microsoft: The UK is facing an AI skills gap. If only there were a humble cloud giant that could help

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: the usage tends to be a little basic.

Perhaps UK businesses call a spade a spade and thus don't consider themselves to be using magical "AI".

Ie.

Do you use machine learning systems? Yes.

Do you use constraints based systems? Yes.

Do you use knowledge-based systems? Yes.

Do you use computer vision? Yes.

Do you use data analytics? Yes.

...

Do you use AI? No - whats that!

It is notable that nowhere in MS's report do they actually define what they mean by "AI".

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: oblig

>Plus: Microsoft to dump support for Cortana on iOS, Android phones

It does seem that MS are in full retreat from the mobile space. It does look like M365 will soon only be available/supported for those with Windows desktops/laptops.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: They call them Home Speakers

>I think that's unlikely to happen in our lifetime, considering I've gone seventeen years without ... a TV license...

This is one of the reasons why vested interests are wanting the legal status of the TV license changed. Once it becomes a simple subscription, collection becomes a commercial opportunity for Captia et al and they do enforce...

So suggest you plan for things to change...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: They call them Home Speakers

@"But I still wouldn’t use it myself as I can’t see the advantages." that's nice but how long before it becomes compulsory, say for COVID19 monitoring or to prevent rape, murder and paedophilia.

Well, on BBC Radio 4 a week or so back there was an interview where it was being suggested making always on dashcams mandatory, so it can't be long before they also decide voice recorders should also be fitted - the insurance company accepts no liability as you had a screaming child as a passenger...

Huawei running out of smartphone CPUs as US sanctions begin to bite

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Kirin will become Karen

>I can't help but think Xi would have been better to give Trump his quid-pro-quo, it would have done less harm to the US economy.

But why would Xi (or any other non-US leader) do anything to stop Trump shooting himself in the foot?

Oppo Find X2 Neo: We're not getting any slimmer through lockdown, but phones are

Roland6 Silver badge

>Do the mainstream manufacturers make phones that aren't good at phonecalls? Genuine question.

Wasn't that one of the complaints about the original iPhone: good at everything other than making phone calls.

How did you spend your time at university? Pizza, booze, sleeping? This Oxford student is snooping on satellites

Roland6 Silver badge

Also, given the nature of the link, any encryption really needs to be end-to-end not be simply implemented by the satellite link.

Someone mush have linked a network analyzer to an Internet core router - it would be interesting to see how the amount of encrypted traffic has grown over the decades, but also I expect there is still much commercially sensitive data flowing unencrypted...

the only difference here is that with RF transmissions you don't need physical access to a switch/router

Fun fact: If you noticed a while ago Zoom's web client going AWOL for a week, it's because someone found a passcode-cracking hole

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: Short visits, last week

> Has anyone observed similar things?

Not when using the waiting room functionality.

Mind you the big problem with Zoom is that it seems the passcodes are per user not per meeting - hence why the use of the waiting room functionality is essential.

Who was behind that stunning Twitter hack? State spies? Probably this Florida kid, say US prosecutors

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I'M confused

Problem is it's the US. Security is all talk and posture and no action and has been like this for decades.

You only need to look at previous 'hacking' cases involving teenagers to see that they hacked supposedly security US military systems, which weren't actually secure; teenagers prosecuted, no change to system security, so systems ready for the next bunch of teenage hackers - its almost like the US's idea of security is to use their production systems as honeypots...

You'll only start to see change when another western leader publicly laughs at the US and dismisses these types of cases. However, can't see the current UK government having the balls to do anything other than meekly comply.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: More and More the Soviet Union Every Day

>sophisticated financial fraud...

I think it depends on your definition of "sophisticated", given we are talking about people who get their news from Twitter, the bar is very low.

There is nothing I've seen from the article to suggest the financial fraud was anything other than basic scamming.

In the market for a second-hand phone? Check it's still supported by the vendor – almost a third sold are not

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: This is why budget/mid range phones are normally better

>My current phone is a Motorola One, it's got 3yrs of security updates...

You are aware that the current version of this phone does not have Android One.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: "beyond the predetermined lifespan of a product"

>Which also means that the phone makers completely ignore the resell market.

Just like the car makers, until they discovered lease purchase and realised that they could sell the same car multiple times over its life.

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: It is worth pointing out

>And my HP laptop from 2008 is running Windows 10 and still getting updates.

Hope you still have the original media and drivers disks...

Upgraded a bunch of HP business desktops from circa 2012. Those that had a fully uptodate W7 install upgraded without problem to W10 1909 and continue to run. However, a small batch I tried doing a clean install of W10 1909, all went well until it couldn't connect to the LAN, then I discovered that 1909 didn't include drivers for certain USB and LAN chipsets that were widely used back then...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: It is worth pointing out

>And my HP laptop from 2008 is running Windows 10

Hope you still have a drivers disk (CD recommended).

Encountered a problem with a bunch HP business desktops from circa 2012, they run W10 1909 just fine if they were upgraded from W7. However, on a few I did a clean install of W10 1909 and discovered that W10 1909 didn't include drivers for some USB and LAN chipsets widely used back then...

Roland6 Silver badge

Re: I like how...

Unfortunately, the soft buttons on my Nokia 6310i have rotted and gone all sticky - looks like time for a clear out.