Posts by Lee D

Re: 46.2Mbps fiber?

Fibre = VDSL in the UK because OFCOM are pathetic and let it slide.

VDSL = ADSL + some knobs on. Max is about 75Mbps in general.

VDSL2 gets up to 200-300Mbps.

Didn't say that.

But when it does, your data is sitting RIGHT THERE. Available to you.

Literally, pop down to PC World, buy a machine, access your backups, bam... data.

On-prem is no different to cloud or anything else - but you have your data in your possession. So even if it means "ARGH! Quick... install an exchange server quickly so we don't lose email on our domain", you can do that. Without having to wait for some cloud provider to switch you over. Or you can pull all your existing files and refer to them. Or you can literally make your own mini-network and get things running again.

While you're tied exclusively into "I have to log in to Azure and it's not working", you can't do a damn thing, even as an admin.

People with brains do on-prem AND cloud, so failure of one doesn't affect the other.

I speak as someone who only two months ago had 450KW of three-phase cable arced together at the main transformer station supplying the entire site. Our servers went down hard.

And I had a copy of the data... just there... literally in arm's reach. Given an absolute emergency, I could have used iSCSI and ANY MACHINE WHATSOEVER to power up some Hyper-V images direct off the storage and booted things up. As it was, it was a weekend and power came back on the Monday, so I just powered up the 50% of kit that wasn't damaged, checked data integrity and carried on as normal.

But if off-prem doesn't let you even log-in... you're stuffed.

And it's basically useless as even without cookies they can track enough to link all your information together.

As I tell the kids in my school, when they think that clearing browser history or using a incognito window will protect them from my wrath - all it does is keep the records off YOUR computer. Not anything further upstream.

As Chrome itself says right on the Incognito window:

---

"Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity. However, downloads and bookmarks will be saved. Learn more

Chrome won’t save the following information:

Your browsing history

Cookies and site data

Information entered in forms

Your activity might still be visible to:

***Websites that you visit***

***Your employer or school***

***Your Internet service provider***"

---

They can tie you into any of your other records without even needing anything more than a vague browser fingerprint, a webpixel image with a particular filename, or any one of myriad identifiers that you're giving out.

Re: Well he's a bit of an arse, but...

Er...

Yes,.

And the problem with that is...?

The *RUBBISH* was that he would be forcibly extradited against the UK's will, or attacked or shot or killed or something.

But charges were always possible and pretty much inevitable.

To apply them to him, they have to apply for extradition. To the UK. Who approve or not based on law. Like everyone else.

What you've done is taken his hyperbole and spin and applied it to "US charges someone who revealed US classified information, and then MAYBE asks for their extradition to face US charges". Which is totally non-shocking, non-news, and non-exciting.

Assange, however, was claiming that he'll be "extraordinarily renditioned" or murdered. Which has been utter tripe. And that's obvious because the bloke is stuck in a VERY VERY public place that he cannot ever leave and gives interviews out of his balcony... hardly the actions of someone who fears being sniped.

Nothing wrong with 8.1.

Slap Classic Shell on it, turn off all the Metro junk, it's pretty much Windows 7 with knobs on and the only real difference is when things want to jump into Metro for no good reason (e.g. some settings options).

Literally, this place was a Windows 7 shop, that had tried to upgrade to 8 "naively" (i.e. not tried to customise it at all) and it was a disaster and reverted and "never again". I took over the IT, silently started rolling out 8.1 with Classic Shell and NOBODY noticed or cared and still haven't 4 years later. The only thing they noticed was the organisation logo in the start menu button, because I put it there as a bit of branding, and they all loved it. That's something that, as far as I know, you can't do with basic Windows alone with all kinds of messy editing.

It's about how you manage it, not the fact that it's 7 / 8.1 / 10. The problem is that I consider 10 too big a leap for my users at the moment so I will lump it together with a load of other big-leaps so they just have to bite the bullet and change the way the work once, rather than 3-4 times over for different things. But that will happen when ALL my suppliers support 10 properly (and have done for a whlle, not just said "we now work on 10"), and the banks etc. are dragging their feet on that.

My dad once ground down the edge of a SIP memory chip (usually only used in printers, but in this case it was for a 386 motherboard that only took SIP memory) with a power-tool to make it fit.

It over-hung the SIP socket and touched a component, so it wouldn't sit in there properly. He literally just took it to the garage and ground it down to the edge of the PCB traces.

Not a big deal, you might think. But we'd paid nearly a grand for that memory upgrade (1Mb to 2Mb!). My brother and I just watched in disbelief as he ground a grand's worth of state-of-the-art chippery to within a slither of the traces with a power-tool...

Worked though. We sold the machine fully-working many years later still with that chip in it. Not sure you'd get away with it nowadays with the multi-layer boards and extreme sensitivity of the chips.

Re: Oh please

You mean those people running mechanical, engineering and physics simulations who can't afford to have errors creep in from the implementation of something that might be there "because it makes this game run faster"?

Yeah, I think they care immensely. Especially when they're doing months or years of calculations and need a stable base to run it on, a predictable and consistent interface to do so, to squeeze every inch out of their hardware, and to do so without unrelated gaming/media functions or driver bugs rearing their head.

Re: Famously???

If you don't want people to call it an XS, don't use those symbols. You can't mix and match Roman numerals with ordinary letters if they're touching like that, or even if they are next to other things that are designed to be pronounced as letters.

And especially never name it such that the Roman numerals and the letters form a word (Excess! Most fitting) when you do pronounce them differently.

Mac OS X. Show me anyone who calls that "OS ten".

You'd think a company that's "all about the design" (cough, choke, splutter*) would know that.

(*Like their famous book on design... which has a white spine... with the name in white... on a white background... with no outline or anything else, just some very subtle "embossed" letters - so in almost all lights, it just looks like an blank white book spine... and is just a photobook that obviously costs something ludicrous like £3 per photo / page inside it).

Re: Getting a proble there?

The other objects are all in orbit around somewhere. It's cheating to consider orbit a speed, because then you get ridiculous values when planets are moving away from each other, etc.

The Pioneer's might qualify but seeing as we haven't contacted either in over a decade, it's pushing it. They were last doing 0.000041c and 0.000037c (same number of zeroes as Voyager).

Let me clarify: Consistent speed relative to Earth. That knocks all of the top 10 out.

Re: Naming Standards clearly designed to confuse...

Yeah, either name consecutively (1, 2, 3, 4) or have a clear distinguisher (RPi 3+ has more on it but from the same series as the 3 - why do you need A or B AND a plus?).

Otherwise it's gets too tricky.

Basically:

Zero = very tiny one.

Pi 1 = single-core 700MHz, 256Mb/512Mb, composite video (later ones had HDMI - grr!)

Pi 2 = quad-core 900MHz, 1Gb, HDMI

Pi 3 = quad-core 1.2+GHz, 1Gb, HDMI

The + models have more USB / Gigabit Ethernet / faster speeds.

But they really mess it up by randomly changing things between models, including three models of zero, the compute modules, putting pins only on certain models (e.g. the PoE pins?), and changing the form factor and even layout between each one.

It would be much easier to standardise the modules, and just not solder the extra components onto the smaller models, just like every other manufacturer does.

Basically, stick with the highest numbers, largest-lettered model available (RPi 3B+ at the moment) unless you have a particular pressing need to optimise power / space.

Re: No way ready!

The difference is quite obvious.

I know that the shadow is cast by a person. The computer doesn't. It has to be told. There's no driving instruction / test where they tell you "watch out for shadows", specifically. A human, though, is able to look at the situation (blue lights / shadow / kid running from the fields several feet off the road / the sight of a ball crossing the road in front of you which is likely to be followed by a small child retrieving it, etc.) and infer things about it that aren't present in the raw data.

The computer *cannot* do this. They can't learn like that. They can't infer anything that's not absolutely 100% inherent in the data or programmed in. They can't slow down every time you pass a police car with blue lights, nor can they track every object to the point that it realises it's a ball and cast the trajectory back to its likely origin without also slamming the brakes on for a paper bag blowing across a motorway.

The machines do *not* infer data. They are incapable of doing so. All of them. Even the "AI" ones. They don't infer. They are told, they try to find a marker within that data which is semi-reliable, and then then guess. They have no idea WHY they have to brake, they don't know why the road is suddenly all shiny and rainbow-coloured and why that means you should probably slow and make no sudden lane changes or steering at that point. They can't infer it back. They can only react to specific data they've been told to look for.

And you CANNOT tell a computer to look for every possible circumstance, with any accuracy. It's just infeasible.

I put my life in a computer's hands every time I get into a car. ABS. An ECU controlling fuel pumps. Even electronic engine timing can blow up a car if it goes wrong. But they are NEVER required to guess. If the oxygen is below this reading, signal failure. If it's between this and that, then you're at this point in the stroke and you should do X, Y, Z. They never "guess". They can't "infer". They don't know why the oxygen sensor suddenly returns zeroes, they just get told what to do if it ever does. This is why most cars with oxygen sensors just stall if the sensor is faulty. They can't infer that it's faulty and ignore it. They just sit, splutter and stall. Disconnect it, and the engine KNOWS it's not there and slips into "limp home" mode. But you have to know to do that.

And that's the entire problem... current tech can't even stop files being deleted, people breaking into websites, or properly autocomplete an English sentence. And you expect it to be even vaguely safe to interpret what is possible the worst scenario ever for a computer vision system?

Never rely on a computer to infer. They can't. They don't understand the world and thus cannot predict it or even notice when they themselves are failing. You give a computer instructions to do far more rapidly and perfectly than you could ever do. That's what they are for, that's what they are best at, that's what they do. You do not get a computer to ever infer anything, certainly not in any life-threatening scenario. These things can't even write a decent paragraph of English text with years of supercomputing efforts behind them. They have no concept of the data they are acting on. They are just following instructions.

Those sufficiently complicated instructions can work wonders, yes, but they cannot generate any sort of intelligence (nobody has ever proven that and, no, a Turing Test is nothing more than a psychology test for a human, not an intelligence test for a computer), and they cannot infer anything that's not present in the data.

If you can't infer, you can't understand the situation, or adapt properly to it, or deal with any situation which you don't have explicit instructions on how to deal with.

Uber is a great example - that self-driving car that killed the woman with the bike? Within a few seconds it detected her as nothing, a wall, a bike, another vehicle, a pedestrian, and then didn't know what to do about any of them. A human would infer from all those instructions what the situation actually was. The car wasn't trained on it at all, and wouldn't have stopped in time even if the braking hadn't been disabled.

Inference is an inately human / animal skill associated with intelligence. If I bop myself on the head with this stick it hurts me. So that means if I bop THAT monkey on the head...

Inference is a vastly different skill and not present in any computer system that I'm aware of. Not one of them tries to trace back the reasoning for the data being classified as such. They just operate on statistics and heuristics. Don't trust your life, quite literally, to chance and what-some-bloke-wrote-down for every situation.

Quite.

I'd like to tinker with these but it looks like a few hundred before you get anything worthwhile, and that has to interface with a bunch of stuff to do anything useful or you have to spend an inordinate amount of time adjusting.

For me, there are a few things in that kind of range: FGPA, SDR and CUDA.

I'd be after a "microbit" of FGPA, if that kind of thing exists. A teeny, tiny version that runs off a USB stick and which you can stick GPIOs etc. on.

https://tinyfpga.com/ looks promising but it'll have to wait for my Christmas funds as likely it won't just be as simple as clicking Buy Now, getting it, plugging it in, and starting to code it up.

Likely by the time I tinker and get there, things like FGPAs will be an inherent part of every processor / motherboard in some fashion anyway. A few people already make RPi boards for them.

Re: Never mind the flaw, look at the *pattern*.

If you violate the EULA, you lose the right to utilise the copy-right for the software.

Thus anything past that point is illegal usage of the software, because you don't have a licence to use it (and you can argue until the cows come home, but usage of software is legally classed under "making a copy of").

No different to how the GPL is enforced - if the software is only licensed under the GPL, and you violate the GPL, you violate the only agreement that gives you any rights whatsoever to the software. Hence, you have no rights to the software. Hence you've broken the law.

The only people who can change that are the ones who licensed it to you in the first place - by choosing to offer you another licence, another chance, overlooking your violations, etc. or otherwise giving you explicit permission to continue using the software.

Software use is a right (literally, a "copy-right") given to you by the creators of the software that describe how you may use it. If you fail to abide by their rules, or don't agree with them - then you have as many rights to the software as anyone else does... zero. The "purchase" and acceptance of an EULA is the only thing that gives you the right to use/copy the software in the first place.

There are complications (e.g. unfair contract terms, having to execute code in order to accept the agreement, etc.) which make what a lawyer would call "interesting questions" (i.e. gimme a few grand and I'll think about how I'd argue it in court, no guarantee of success). But pretty much you abide by the EULA or you literally have no right to the software whatsoever.

Don't believe the hype that EULAs are unenforceable either. It's not that simple. It's like saying that a tiny flaw in one particular huge contract makes the whole concept of contracts unenforcable. It's not true. And pretty much there's a clause that says "If one thing in this contract isn't allowed, all the rest still apply anyway" (and, amazingly, it doesn't even NEED to say that... that's very much a "your statutory rights are not affected" statement... of course they're not... they're STATUTORY rights...).

Re: Far too common

Next time give them a PAYG phone number and a forwarded free email address that you have never given anyone else.

Cost: Pence.

Impact: Nice letter winging it's way to them and the Data Protection ombudsman saying you've totally abused the data I've given you without permission and/or failed to secure it and not notified me of a breach... which is it?

P.S. Have done exactly this. Have screwed company to wall who used a stolen customer database. I know they did because (in my best Del Boy impression "That's not the hand I dealt you...") this case... That's EXACTLY the email address that I only dealt SOMEONE ELSE and not you...

Re: no more Towers?

5G doesn't need them.

In fact, the first 5G rollouts won't even be able to. The licence auction hasn't happened yet.

The high-freq stuff is merely a nice extra - if you're in range, you'll get "even faster" but existing towers and even some existing frequencies will always be used (and not just by "fallback to 4G").

5G doesn't "need" anything beyond what's already there. It just makes it slightly faster and have clearer channels.

It's like saying you "need" 5GHz for 802.11n. No. You don't. It'll still be faster on 2.4GHz than b and g ever were. But if you're able to use that higher frequency too, you'll go even faster.

Ya cannae beat the laws of physics, Jim.

And I've run an entire school for two weeks off 4G sticks before now and nobody was any the wiser.

Easy it's called "I can implement that change, but it'll cost you one IT Manager and a lawsuit about trying to get rid of them for providing adequate data and system security with a reasonable, demonstrably-effective, proven and already-in-place system".

Also, that in any proper workplace, such people DO NOT have access to the IT system whatsoever (physically or electronically), in any way, to implement such a change behind your back - even if they got IBM/Microsoft themselves to come in and try to do it.

Hint: The triggering of any one tripwire which suggests intrusion - whether by my own employees (IT department), other employees, outside entities, management, or any of their consultants - will result in the correct response in the case of such potential compromise. A full system shutdown until the situation can be determined.

Other hint: Every workplace I work at is made aware of a simple rule. If I ever discover that the master password lists / backup devices are accessed by anyone other than authorised personnel in the reasonable execution of their jobs (and I will know), I walk.

You really need to read GDPR. Unless your boss has a reason to have the domain administrator's password/access (hint: They don't, unless that boss is the domain administrator), then it's illegal for them to have it. They can *request* it. They can *instruct* me to hand it over. And I guarantee that it'll cost them one IT Manager and a lawsuit unless it was absolutely required (e.g. I'm in a coma in hospital somewhere).

P.S. The best way to stop such things is to say "Sure, I'll do that. But it's against my advice. Just sign here to tell me that you understand that and accept the consequences". I've actually used that. It's incredibly effective. No, my boss does not have any IT rights beyond that of any other member of staff working in such a position (e.g. he has a PC with office, rights to the documents he requires, but can't even rebuild his own machine or log into a server).

Re: Can anyone tell me the advantage of face/print unlock?

Having something in your brain (currently) leaves no physical impression or trace that can be detected or copied.

Having something on your body doesn't. It may be "complex" to copy, but it's there. And can be fooled by things like Gummi Bears or just a high-quality print-out.

Nobody has yet managed to pluck a thought from someone's head (though Derren Brown can show you quite a few tricks), so that's the ONLY way to be secure at the moment.

Anything else is security snakeoil. In the same way that your briefcase doesn't need to withstand a bunch of safe-crackers (given 5 minutes, a fast hand, and the opportunity and I'll open any 6-digit briefcase combination lock for you), some people are happy with "no security but a slight inconvenience".

If you care about security, a PIN / passphrase is the only way to go.

Re: But... what will it cost?

https://mobiletechtalk.co.uk/4gee-home-router-review/

I pay-per-month. So that's a £100 up-front cost, for a device I'll literally never use, then £50+ a month, for lower speeds, with dodgy traffic and being backed by BT (who are the very reason I can't get decent local broadband in the first place).

For 100Gb on that, I'd have to pay £100 + 12 x £45 = £640 a year, which is £53.33 a month, or sign up for 18-months (which I can do with Three but deliberately avoid doing even though I'd save).

It's an option, sure, but it's not one I'd choose, and it's still just-as-cheap to buy two SIMs from Three instead, and kit of my choice, and use them in tandem. Or just buy a smaller data SIM from each and then use EE when Three falls over, etc.

Friend bought round XBox 360. It worked. No UPnP.

I have 1000 games on my Steam account. They all work. Online.

Skype, Whatsapp, hundreds of apps, phones, other people's consoles on games nights, you name it. They all work.

You only EVER *NEED* a port-forward if you are HOSTING content. You do not need it to game, join servers, browse servers or anything else. All major consoles have matchmaking services that can handle that side for you, no port-forwards required. And that's because only when you are actually being a server should you be punching holes in your firewall to let others in (rather than talking to a matchmaking server, or talking over an ESTABLISHED connection to another person which is what matchmaking servers set up for you).

Seriously. Turn UPnP off now. Play any game you like. See what happens. At absolute worst, XBox even has a term for it that shows up in the settings that nobody ever looks at... it basically means "you're behind a NAT, so I'll use a matchmaking service that knows that".

UPnP has several functions - one discovers things over the local network using local broadcast/multicast addresses. That's fine, and is on the client. One tells the local network that there is indeed a way to get to the Internet. That's fine, but often runs on the router and is entirely unnecessary on any modern operating system. Some advanced routers (e.g. Draytek) will have an option to leave that on, if you like. It's called "Connectivity Status". The other thing UPnP does is the port-forward thing. Every client asks for port-forwards. If your router grants them, this is by far not the first security problem with that. If you turn them off, the clients carry on regardless. Even weird stuff like videoconferencing, Steam matchmaking etc.

Before you start spreading nonsense saying that you "have to have UPnP", turn it off and see what happens. It's literally one click on your router.

Then tell me why you would ever want that functionality enabled on, say, a corporate network either, and why they turn it off from day one, and who's likely to be the biggest user of things like port-forwards and SIP / H232 / etc. protocols that all "need" that... yet it all works without UPnP.

Honestly, just try it. Nobody is even suggesting you have to ditch your local wireless devices, because they can use mDNS and UPnP etc. discovery over your local network, and connect to the Internet to do everything they need, without EVER HAVING to use it to punch as many holes in your firewall as they like.

TURN OFF UPNP ON YOUR ROUTER. Seriously. Not your clients, they can do what they like, because they can't punch holes in your security without the router's assistance and will just discover each other and work around it. And if you *didn't* know this, you really need to think why you're on an IT forum.

Re: Downloads

Google Play Store can throw you some doozies if you have a bunch of phones and a handful of apps that need updating.

An iPad / Windows / MacOS update can easily be gigabytes on its own.

Hell, the other day I downloaded a couple of movies from Google Play onto a mobile device and they were gigabytes before I even got a few on. Let alone, say, an entire TV series.

If you can burn through 50-100Gb in a month just browsing as an ordinary family, you can be sure that the speed at which you can download a 5Gb file matters a lot.