* Posts by Martin Summers

1503 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011

UK mobile network EE plumps for Nokia to provide that all-important 5G RAN equipment

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Please Sir …

"What's a RAN, Sir?"

And you call yourself a detective?

Ethernet failure on Swiss business jet prompted emergency descent, say aviation safety bods

Martin Summers Silver badge

Well yes, an emergency descent system is only going to help for a short (possibly very short) amount of time isn't it!

(Hopefully this system is just to bring the plane down to a level where masks aren't required)

Ancient telly borked broadband for entire Welsh village

Martin Summers Silver badge

If anything makes the case for Fibre this is probably it. I wonder if they spent more on the investigation and engineers than they would have putting fibre in. I do think it's unfair to blame the TVs owner for what is essentially an invisible problem. It'd have been nice to know that BT in the relief they didn't have to spend any more trying to fix the problem, had just bought them a new TV rather than them feeling mortified and embarrassed (according to the BBC article).

Won't somebody think of the Oracle execs? No pay rises, bonuses, equity awards for top brass until 2022 at earliest

Martin Summers Silver badge

Ah the punishing cost of TikTok, sucking up the president, and trying to be trendy bites already. I shed a tear for them.

Ha. Yeah right.

Internet Archive's way cool Wayback Machine gets way more websites in Cloudflare fail-over pact

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Wayback Machine who cares

Well although you have put the joke icon, in a sense you're right. There's a lot on the Web now that is just commercial crap. When I started using the Web in the 90's there was lots going on that captured the Internet and the people who used it in personal Web pages (even Geocities!). You don't get that really anymore, Facebook and MySpace etc killed off the personal Web page and no-one bothered to put the effort in again. People cringe when they remember the animated GIFs and banners proclaiming 'this page is under construction' and several logos for the browsers your site works best in. I miss it. I remember when I made my first website on the AOL hometown Web space I had (oddly only AOL would work on my 486 loaded from floppies to get me barely online), and some random person from the US contacted me about some of the content I put on there. The Web was exciting back then, a bit wild but a community of like minded people nonetheless. What are they really archiving now that we will want to see in the future that isn't behind a paywall/walled garden or some such? From what I've seen of Wayback machine, sadly it missed a lot of what made up pages back then, images etc, through no fault of their own of course. The interesting bit of the Web, it's history, it's roots, that was the bit that was worth saving. We are going to lose a lot of our culture the day no one can or wants to pay the bills to keep the electrons flowing within this project.

Ah yes, Sony, that major player in the smartphone space, has a new flagship inbound: The Xperia 5 II

Martin Summers Silver badge

"Not including 8K video capture/recording is a huge oversight."

Is it heck. Seriously where do these people get these ideas. I've got 8k on my S20. Do I use it? No. Am I ever likely to use it? No. I'll probably be too old to discern the benefit of it by the time playback equipment becomes properly main stream and I can afford it.

Microsoft to charge $200 for 32 GPU cores, sliver of CPU clockspeed, 6GB RAM, 512GB SSD... and a Blu-Ray player

Martin Summers Silver badge

There's already been a digital only X-Box One S. I assume the trial has been successful hence this new release.

What rhymes with 'boom' and is veritably raking it in thanks to the coronavirus pandemic?

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Probably coincided with the introduction of end to end encryption by default?

Or let's be honest, more likely they were overruled.

The truth is, honest people need willpower to cheat, while cheaters need it to be honest

Martin Summers Silver badge

"There are immense economic costs caused by dishonest behaviour, such as tax evasion, music piracy or business scandals, so finding effective ways to reduce dishonest behaviour are of great relevance to policy makers."

So how will this realistically manifest itself? 'Oh its just a routine brain scan sir to see if you're telling us the truth' in any financial transactions or interaction with the law? This would be the very edge of my comfort levels. Perversely for those that find it hard to make themselves believed, then this kind of test could actually be a relief. I highly doubt it could be accurate enough to never be gamed or to give high levels of assurance. It would end up like current lie detector tests that cannot be relied on. If they can assure no less than 100% (peer reviewed and lots of testing) on accuracy then I might be open to police using the tech on potential criminals. Never going to happen though.

The Viking Snowden: Denmark spy chief 'relieved of duty' after whistleblower reveals illegal snooping on citizens

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Re: Hardly democratic ... but not unusual in dodgy business circles.

Bad bot

Pass that Brit guy with the right-hand drive: UK looking into legalising automated lane-keeping systems by 2021

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: re: Is this the final triumph of the middle lane hogger ?

"I vote for the Citröen C4 Cactus as being the ugliest."

I raise you with the Nissan Juke.

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

Martin Summers Silver badge

"Really it doesn't make you special."

Signing the Official Secrets Act is on my bucket list. It would make me *feel* special, and that's all that matters.

Amazon makes 850,000m2 bet that its people will get off the kitchen table and back to an office

Martin Summers Silver badge

Tax relief

For those of you that were not aware. You can claim around £6 a week tax relief backdated to when you started working from home. Not a lot but may help someone.

https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/claim-tax-relief-expenses/who-claiming-for

https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2020/04/martin-lewis--working-from-home-due-to-coronavirus--claim-p6-wk-/

AWS creates a quantum computing cloud with classical testbed plus rentable qubits

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: "AWS suggests the cloudy option for complex algos that use 34 or more qubits"

So, we know amanfromMars1 parses the replies to the drivel it posts and replies with more drivel. Is there anything that can be put in said reply to royally screw with it? Asking for a friend...

Congratulations Peebles. Felicitations Queenzieburn. Openreach is bringing you FTTP (yes, they're real places)

Martin Summers Silver badge

We are soon going to be in a position where the rural areas are going to be better served than cities and towns. Just because an area is well served by existing service providers, it doesn't mean those areas get good service or indeed much actual choice. I've had to swallow my pride and go with Virgin Media in my town to get more bandwidth. Everything else is Openreach. You'd think providers would want to keep things even across the board and have some easy pickings. It now seems to be going too far the other way focusing on sparsely inhabited population areas bringing benefits of newer technologies to fewer people. I wish companies like City Fibre would set up in my town and give the incumbents a run for their money.

I wonder if we will see a reversal of the "You chose to live there" argument when it comes to comments regarding broadband. Strange times.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Martin Summers Silver badge

'It wasn't mildly amusing, it's brain dead shite.'

Being brain dead is what happens when you're on crack after a bit presumably. I'm with the commenter above you though. I thought my comment was mildly amusing too and I just had to get it out there. Puns need an outlet.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Whoever is spending that much money and effort on a prank must be on quack.

Pokémon Go players fined for breaking down-under COVID-19 lockdown rules

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Crazy

Nightfox you've hit the nail square on the head. Now if only more people cared to understand the necessary simplicity of the rules there'd be less wailing and gnashing. People choose not to understand because it suits them. So many people in the world couldn't care less about doing what's right for everyone, so they carry on as normal and pretend the rules were confusing.

You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot

Martin Summers Silver badge

Anyone deploying this type of customer suppression is not doing it to help the customer. Very rarely have I found an automated system that actually helps with anything.

Eventually companies' call volumes will reduce and they will think they are on to a winner. Until they realise that most of their customers left for the sake of not being able to get a simple query resolved. It will take a while for that to kick in but it will happen, and by then it may be too late for them. Taking the human element out of customer service rarely works.

HTC breaks with tradition to push out 2 phones someone might actually want to buy

Martin Summers Silver badge

It's after care was crap and more importantly its build quality was crap. I've never owned a phone with flaky paint and as many lock ups, since my last HTC many years ago, and I won't risk it again.

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Nothing so simple

It's a vacuum in a tunnel, not space....

Martin Summers Silver badge

I think I'd rather get lubed up and use the hyperloop tunnel as a giant slip and slide rather than be shot down it in a vacuum. Am I incorrect in thinking you could get pasted up the wall of the capsule if something goes wrong? Not for me even sedated I think!

Ever felt down after staring at your phone late in bed? It's not just you – mice do too

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Control Groups

They stopped what they were doing, then started again.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: So it’s the blue light all along

I'm pretty sure that mice are currently unaware of the global pandemic or race riots etc.

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: That's a first!

Well that's one angle on it. Maybe the miscreants just wanted a refund for a flight from Easyjet. Obtaining and using someone else's credit card details from them was possibly the easiest way to achieve that.

Ofcom: Rule change to force UK comms providers to tell you when your contract expires

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: IPv6 disclosures?

Like it actually matters. If you want IPV6 so bad go with a provider that offers it. I don't think it's Ofcoms job to get involved with such niche technical aspects of ISP's services.

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Martin Summers Silver badge

Let's be fair to this error message. Its not for a techie, it's for the customer who has come up to get a drink to tell them it can't serve them. Otherwise what else is meant to happen, it says nothing on screen and the customer gets frustrated because nothing is happening?

This isn't even a Windows error message, aside from the fact you can see Windows is present this really has nothing to do Windows. It's an error generated by the software running the vending. Not quite what I expect from the bork column to be honest. OS errors interjecting into customer facing applications is usually what's funny about these contributions.

Back of the net! Norfolk County Council kicks off £18m Oracle cloud ERP deal

Martin Summers Silver badge

Oh dear. Give it a couple of years and I fully expect them to be tendering again. I can guarantee this will not go well. I keep wondering where Oracle are getting the customers still and why their new customers have not done enough due diligence on this company.

Unfortunately, thanks to the way councils have to procure services by law, Oracle probably had a crack team working on fitting the procurement criteria to the letter and deep enough pockets to price everyone else out. I don't think there's anything a council can do to account for the fact that a company are known to be utterly shite on their application. They'd have more than likely had no choice but to go with them. I bet their IT department are absolutely dispairing.

Comms giant Telefonica confirms O2 in talks to merge with Virgin Media

Martin Summers Silver badge

Ah Mercury, I did extended work experience at their NOC at Small Heath in the mid 90's. Manager who was looking after me said he'd have offered me a job had I been old enough as I'd got a good grasp of PDH and SDH. Alas many years later and I wish I'd pursued that a bit more at the time as compared to the jobs I've done since it was a pretty cool place to work.

Martin Summers Silver badge

That will be interesting considering Vodafone were meant to be hosting the Virgin Mobile MVNO as of next year. I imagine there have been some worried phone calls and checking of contracts going on behind the scenes.

Browse mode: We're not goofing off on the Sidebar of Shame and online shopping sites, says UK's Ministry of Defence

Martin Summers Silver badge

I've tried sucking up before too. Alas, still no gold badge.

Brit magistrates' courts turn to video conferencing to keep wheels of justice turning

Martin Summers Silver badge

I've got a better idea. Can people just bloody stop committing crimes for a bit pretty please? Cheers.

Cheshire Police celebrates three-year migration to Oracle Fusion by lobbing out tender for system to replace it... one year later

Martin Summers Silver badge

Why do they want to leave after 12 months?

Because they've had 12 months of Oracle's production 'support'. That's why.

Sophos XG firewalls hacked, hotfix ready. Texts wreck Apple iThings. Yup, business as usual in infosec world

Martin Summers Silver badge
Facepalm

I've just made myself really popular with my wife sending her the Apple crash message and losing her a weeks worth of messages. Wasn't the wisest of moves on my part.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: OMG

"And obviously, leaving the safe confined air recirculated close proximity of a sub for the shore - madness"

Quite. I am sure after they've been back for a day they'll be clamouring to get back in the tin can and resurface again when all this is over!

Zuck loves free speech so much Facebook will censor 'anti-state' content in Vietnam after telcos 'crippled' access

Martin Summers Silver badge

If it stuck it out for 7 weeks then it should have stuck it out for longer.

You are either committed to free speech, or you aren't.

Baby, I swear it's déjà vu: TalkTalk customers unable to opt out of ISP's ad-jacking DNS – just like six years ago

Martin Summers Silver badge

If you think this is bad, anyone remember when Network Solutions did it for the entire Internet in the root DNS?

Europe publishes draft rules for coronavirus contact-tracing app development, on a relaxed schedule

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: We know what you did ...

We will never be rid of people in our society who don't give a fuck. It's depressing. Most of us care, most of us try our hardest to do as we should and do right by others. Some of us don't want to and never will. It often seems they have better lives than we do because they just don't worry about the things we worry about.

But I could never, and will never, become one of them.

Samsung's Q1 forecast defies coronavirus downward trends but it's unlikely to continue

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: S20

My inner geek said "Get the ultra" my sensible self said "No way am I spending that kind of money on a phone". I've got an S20 5G because I wanted an upgrade from the S9 and I'm glad to say it was thankfully worthwhile. I skipped the S10 as I thought it was their first foray into this form factor with an under screen fingerprint sensor and wasn't going to suffer any issues they've had (only to find they've used the same sensor!).

I don't understand why they've decided to alienate their customers who liked owning their flagship phones knowing they were getting better value for money than iFans by releasing premium varients of the same model. I won't fall for it and they can sod off if they ever think I will pay to be in their premium club. I don't imagine in the long run they will sell enough ultras to justify their decision.

Samsung succeed when they're not trying their hardest to ape Apple and chase their margins.

Cloudflare family-friendly DNS service flubs first filtering foray: Vital LGBTQ, sex-ed sites blocked 'by mistake'

Martin Summers Silver badge

"Presumably it also does it for free?"

Yes, it is free.

"Frankly, sadly, changing a home router's DHCP server to hand out a different DNS server address is going to be well beyond what most parents are capable of."

If you've not got the technical smarts to put it in place yourself then you're not going to be 'censored' involuntarily are you. Censoring is a strong word and this is most certainly not what Cloudflare are doing.

"I suspect a significant chunk of parents have no idea how to go about restricting what their kids can access."

I suspect a significant chunk of parents don't care what their kids access and never will. There's plenty of advice and ways to filter the Internet for kids if you are so inclined to do so and they're not particularly technical. Companies have made it their business to provide specifically this for decades now. In this article we are talking about DNS filtering which can be done at the OS level if needs be which can be done following a step by step guide. I suspect most people will choose an easier software route if they're not capable.

Martin Summers Silver badge

They're not censoring the bloody Internet. People are *choosing* to use their DNS filtering service. There's a big difference. It can be removed just as easily as it was put in place. It's a filtering service, it filtered stuff. Others providers like openDNS are available and you can even choose to not block specific sites if you want to.

Who's going to pay for Britain's Aunty Beeb to carry on? Broadband users, broadcaster suggests to government

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: April Fool

Unfortunately even if it was, I wouldn't be at all surprised at the suggestion of such a levy.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Martin Summers Silver badge

"Is this a bad time to bring up the recent study about the carbon footprint of a single email?"

I'd hazard a yes.

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Zloirock

Make sure you've got trousers on!

World's smallest violin to be played for opportunistic sellers banned from eBay and Amazon for price gouging

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: The best way to fsck these scum

Bob, I appreciate the sentiment but I think the police have enough to be going on with at the moment. It's one thing the price gougers putting their wares on eBay but it's another that people are actually willingly buying them, noone is forcing them. This is eBays responsibility to Police and they will take the reputation hit if they don't.

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: The best way to fsck these scum

I've spent a couple of minutes a night to go through and report every single item I've found for price gouging. They don't seem to be getting taken down though unfortunately.

Hypochondriacs – are your eyes all blurry? It's just YouTube trying to cut video-stream quality worldwide amid the coronavirus pandemic

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: Huh?

Oh don't get me started on the waste of bandwidth and sheer annoyance of having to watch adverts before each and every stream I play on Amazon Prime. Can't even switch it off. At least Netflix have finally had the decency to allow you to switch off their shocking auto previews when scrolling through content. I suspect though that was more to do with competition coming along than listening to customers.

TeamViewer is going to turn around and ignore what you're doing with its freebie licence to help new remote workers

Martin Summers Silver badge

"As other services (*cough* Teams *cough*)"

Is this a new and persistent cough? Do you have a fever?

SpaceX beats an engine failure to loft another 60 Starlink satellites

Martin Summers Silver badge

"Are all the satellites getting the new paint job?"

I shouldn't think so, who would want to be the one up there with a tin of paint and a brush? I'm crap enough at painting without having to catch the bloody thing I want to paint first.

Morrisons puts non-essential tech changes on ice as panic-stricken shoppers strip stores

Martin Summers Silver badge

Re: "throughput of goods is in excess of the usual Christmas peak"

People are panic buying toilet roll apparently because if you're stuck inside isolating it's the last thing you'd want to run out of (other than food) and you don't want to be mixing with lots of potentially infected people in a supermarket to get more.