Posts by Disgruntled of TW

What do MPs understand?

I'm sorry, but I am troubled by the need for MPs, who most likely lack the technical security knowledge, to understand the scale of a CNI attack and bring it to our attention. The financial impact they may have more of an eye on, but that quickly descends into hearsay without data and facts.

The profits of the organisations that operate our CNI are indeed worthy targets for the MPs that hold the regulatory sticks. I believe Bruce Schneier is now a supporter of the government wielded regulatory stick, as more than two decades of carrots and goodwill has achieved very little in secure behaviours for IoT vendors, and those operating our CNI.

Let the stick beatings begin, hopefully to a hip rhythm so the rest of us can dance safely.

Tit for tat ...

... is appealing, for consideration. Imagine the fun we'd have if Nominet did this for .uk. Only British Citizens - all ye EU folk can lose your domains.

Are we big enough to NOT do this? I think so, as its commercially stupid, and nothing to do with who you are.

Just like the reciprocal guaranteeing of citizens rights? Trump went all evil on tariffs, and got a more or less immediate response. Should we threaten mucking with .uk in this way? I am quite certain the EU folk with .uk domains would lose considerably more than UK folk with .eu domains - I know I didn't bother grabbing any .eu, and certainly won't bother now.

It's lack of success makes it even less desirable even as a squatting preventor.

Sigh. This behaviour is a big contributor to why I voted leave. There is a lack of intellect and common sense in the political centre of the EU. Same lack here in the UK, but we're about to get rid of one lot, making the problem smaller.

Production on an alpha service ...

... he should have known better. By his own admission, promoting to prod, after declaring AKS as "alpha released to GA" his CI/CD is letting him down.

Broken information ...

... when the train stops in the middle of nowhere, means a quick GoogleMaps check uses your 50MB in under 2 mins. This has *nothing* to do with "sharing the bandwidth". Restricting the throughput of individual flows from a single MAC address would do that. Enforcing a fixed data allowance per MAC login is quite a different thing. Saying that "only" 25% of users hit this is jaw dropping - one QUARTER of your users have their internet broken in a matter of minutes and this is "not an issue"?

Train companies meeting my expectations I'm afraid. If I could, I would vote with my feet, but they know a captive commuter market when they see one and its too far to run into London. My 4G works 34.2% of my journey. I basically download everything important before I hit the train. Sad.

Nose, face, bite ...

Sad that the EU is taking this approach. There are many agreements which do not depend on membership of the EU, and this feels like a spiteful baby/bathtub response with no benefit to the EU other than a bargaining chip as we exit.

Bitterness and failure

This discussion thread is riddled with bitterness, factless commentary and doomsday predictions. Both the EU and UK will suffer from this tit-for-tat nastiness.

There is much to improve in the EU. Erosion of democracy, known to all members, is my greatest concern. Politicians are embarrassing themselves on both sides with current behaviors. It needs reform, which this sorry Brexit situation may facilitate.

Meanwhile, both sides need to grow up, stop punching each other and work out how to resolve the Brexit problem via mutual compromise. Democracy must not be a casualty. The UK will leave. Lets stop bickering and get on with it - both sides.

Same mistake again

10Mbps *downstream* with nothing said about *upstream*. The Internet is a different place than it was when we started with banks of modems. Collaboration via video conferencing and backups to cloud storage mean bandwidth must now be bidirectional and not asynchronous.

Our gubbermint is not understanding this, and continuing with a decision made by BT/Openreach more than a decade ago, to provide asynchronous internet access biased 5:1 at least, for download.

Once they fix that they need to address contention and latency to prevent running the Shetland islands from a 2Mbps satellite feed with 700ms latency. Your 10Mbps to the local PoP is great, but not so much if the backhaul is 20 Mbps, shared by 200 people. Devil is in the detail. Just sayin'.

4% global turnover or €20M will help if ...

... the Treasury's Consolidated Fund decides to give them more of the proceeds of their enforcement effort. The ICO doesn't keep the fine money. It goes directly to the Treasury Consolidated Fund.

The ICO must also apply the fines with more gusto. Too many organisations see a DPA/GDPR fine as a cost of doing business. That has to change, with one or two big take downs using the GDPR limits.

Are you listening Carphone Warehouse? Are you listening TalkTalk?

Good stuff but a sticking plaster fix ...

... as we will need fibre eventually. Wifi radio spectrum is a CDMA network i.e. it is a shared carrier so that if 50 people start using the same mast/radio/channel, and it has 50Mbps bandwidth, everyone will get 1 Mbps (simplified) which isn't likely to impress if they all want to watch the same footy match on BT Sport. Adding masts and radios and using multiple channels simply fudges the numbers, without solving the limited spectrum problem. It just kicks it down the road.

Something is better than nothing, so the effort is to be applauded. Just like the VDSL network our government and Openreach have deployed under the "Superfast" nomenclature, its carrier capability is extremely limited in comparison to a physical fibre optic cable. It is also regret spend, as both VDSL and Wifi will not assist materially with deployment of the fibre we will need to everyone's property to embrace the opportunities of the future.

What could possibly go wrong ...

... in having a machine build "solutions" no doubt driven by a catalogue of services from IBM only. I wonder if it ever DOESN'T provide a solution?

Watson: "That problem is NP-Complete sir, I have no solution."

Probably not.

Rebuilding the rural divide ...

All these FTTP announcements are addressing urban areas where the ROI is better. We are rebuilding the "problem" that BDUK was intended to resolve - in the city you get fibre, in the country you get less, much less. Services will expand to use available bandwidth making statements like "I'm fine with 20Mbps" short sighted. Getting your HD video stream squeezed in-between full HDR 4K video will get less and less reliable .... your 20 Mbps today won't perform so well tomorrow due to noisier high bandwidth neighbours. On the public internet there ain't no QoS.

The gubbermint needs to skip the inevitable decade of realisation and go full fibre everywhere NOW. Everywhere. NOW. Do it. Please. Being 3rd last in the EU table for FTTH is resolvable.

That is all.

Convergent function to make all CVs ...

... identical. A dystopian future beckons ... where those unable to write a competent CV will have the AI engine write it for them, averaging all existing CVs, and ultimately all CVs will be created the same. The HR droids will lose the filter weapon they enjoy the most.

When will the automaton tip over into mundanity with inadequate differentiation? Can't be long now ...

One way traffic ...

Once again, we're taking whatever medicine the incumbent monopolist gives us. Video conferencing, backup to the cloud and uploading video and photos will remain slow as our government has allowed Openreach to deploy technology which cannot provide "super fast" (ugh) speeds in BOTH directions.

The future is sharing data, in both directions. Not what our short-sighted government has allowed to happen with our tax money.

Snail pace ...

But the penny is dropping. Everything the FTTH community has been saying for decades is now coming true, in still frame time lapse motion to give the impression the government and BT were right all along.

The economical damage done to UK Plc by being next to last on full fibre adoption will be felt by the next generation.

But it is now happening, albeit slowly. It would be much faster if the government had supported initiatives like B4RN instead of BDUK.

Remove the VOA fibre-tax (permanently)

I've said enough about FTTP and why BT and OpenReach are failing, so here's one for the gubbermint.

SCRAP IMMEDIATELY the Valuation Office Agency business rates on lit fibre - not just the 5 year reprieve started in 2016. It is the equivalent of taxing windows in 18th century Scotland. Not only is it stifling innovation and deployment, it is unfair as BT gets assessed differently from everyone else.

Fastest speeds are with B4RN ...

... not the measly 200ish Mbps mentioned in the article. B4RN gives you synchronous (yup - read that again to make sure - SYNCHRONOUS!) 1 Gbps speed. It's a measurable 950+ Mbps speed. Both directions.

Rural communities can do broadband better than Openreach, if only the gubbermint was prepared to allow them the chance. They are not making it easy, yet.

5G is not a "thing", yet

Despite what the politicians say.

3G still hasn't delivered ...

... utterly nonplussed by the 5G hype, and unsurprising that DCMS folk talk such verbiage. They just don't understand. It's why we are so disillusioned with politicians.

Edinburgh Uni and Standard ML

Giggle. Sorry. I hoped for a brief millisec or so that we were comparing the functional language "Standard ML" as created by Robin Milner and the LFCS in 1987. Somebody wrote a garbage collector for it while I was studying there ... no quiche eaters, just real programmers back in the day. Fond memories.

Follow the money ...

So for real kudos ... are Microsoft following the money that paid for the ad? Surely a scammer like this leaves a trail? How did they cover their tracks, and how are Microsoft preventing the same ad from being placed again?

Watching TV over 3G never happened in 2003 ...

So why do they think we'll drink the same coolaid here?

We were promised video over 3G in 2003 ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2808761.stm

Basic contention with other users and coverage will kill this. I can't even listen to a streamed MP3 over itunes for more than 90s travelling on a mainline commuter train into London over a period of 52 minutes. that's what 4G has delivered for me.

So, sorry EE and anybody else talking up irrelevant performance numbers ... make what we've got deliver what you promised the last time, then I'll start listening.

Outlaw the use of "up to" - it is lying about the truth

That is all.

Only used for good ...

No evil here then. Kim Jong-un promises to use nuclear technology only for the good of his DPRK state. The inventors do not get to choose.

Rude not to say speaker on

Generally a positive story with everyone more or less getting what they deserve, however not making sure the belligerent boss was aware he was on speaker was not cricket. The BOFH lost some cred there.

Sorry state of Agency marketing

Typical guv technical debt nonsense aside, you've just highlighted an example of the value that the majority of agencies now bring to clients. Hiring clients pay 10% or more for the "value" in publishing such job descriptions on job boards, 3 conversations with the contractor, timesheet management, and that's it. This model is dying, and they know it.

We need to cull the majority of numbers-playing agencies, and keep the ones that take appropriate amounts of time to understand the requirement, build relationships with a smaller number of very good contractors, and do the match. Agencies that don't return calls, send huge amounts of SPAM, don't understand the TLAs they splatter their SPAM with, are on the extinction list. They won't be missed.

Learned their approach to looking good from BDUK

Let's define "super fast" as the speed achievable by DSL, so that we price out any competition from FTTP companies who want to fix the problem once, and lay the fibre. Only the incumbent operator could ever bid, as they own the crappy-copper in the ground already.

The US and UK will be stuck with copper-crap until someone puts the fibre in the ground - ALL of the ground.

Meh.

Sputtering ...

is what my kids did while eating jars of mushy brown baby food. Never thought I'd see this achieving 880Gb/in

Mobile operators ...

... reaping the contempt they deserve. No surprise here. I've moved from Voda, to O2, to T-Mobile, to Voda, to Three to EE. All equally poor. I pick the least evil, and most reliable, as customer services with all of them is a time sink with no benefit.

We were all supposed to be watching TV on our phones on the train, when 3G arrived - remember?

I simply no longer trust the operators and ignore their advertising.

Have they told VMware?

... I'm not convinced they'll be able to completely flush the vCenter flash web client in three years.

Instagram and Snapchat next ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/40601036/teens-found-selling-drugs-on-snapchat-and-instagram-bbc-three-investigation-finds

Both organisations adopting the ostrich technique of problem management despite BBC documentary. Stacey Dooley rather brave in confronitng 15 year old kids flogging via Snapchat and Instagram.

Super Fast Broadband != "fibre"

@Dave Bull - yup. 1 ft of copper is enough to make 5Km of fibre irrelevant to the SERVICE a customer receives. Those metaphorical 12 inches of copper contribute the majority of the problems to reliability, which increases maintenance cost. All of this ignored by the ASA who allow all the ISPs selling DSL to use "fibre" to describe it in advertising. STOP IT.

From the agency that let BT and Virgin advertise "Superfast Fibre Broadband"

... when the fibre stops at a cabinet many hundred meters away from your house at best. I complained, and they said "because the fibre represents the most significant distance along which the data travels, it is permitted to call it fibre broadband".

This ignores the fact that the weeny piece of copper string at the end of the fibre is what dictates the ACTUAL PERFORMANCE of the connection.

This is more nannying from an organisation that meddles and really shouldn't feel obligated to worry about society/services that it isn't responsible for and doesn't understand. Stop it. Focus on fairness and stop the lying. Leave the rest of the grown-ups alone.

The "demand" is irrelevant

It is the necessity of remaining competitive in markets where other countries have FTTP and have capabilities and opportunities that are being denied to us. Openreach's argument is old ... they have the monopoly and should be investing in UK Plc's future.

It is plain dumb to think anything other than FTTP, and FULL FTTP, not some G.PON asynchronous pong, is what we need. BT unilaterally decided that we all wanted to suck FROM the internet and never send large amounts of data TO the internet. That was correct decades ago, and utter nonsense today.

Bought a 16GB phone with a 4MP camera recently? Tried backing that up to "the cloud"? If you think you sent GBs to the cloud you are being lied to by your provider.

Scrap HS2, and get the whole country FTTP. No brainer.

Quiet news day?

... if this is considered news.

Bring it on.

I'm glad someone has the time and money to do this. I have taken to moaning about it over a couple of pints of IPA in my local pub.

Who is the more foolish ...

... the fool, or the fool who follows him?

--Obi Wan