Posts by Lee D

Re: just receive an IP stream, buffer as necessary.

Live radio is already buffered.

Seven-second delay to cut out obscenities, etc. when they have phone-ins.

Literally just delay it by a few seconds (okay, you'll have to adjust the clocks in the studio but I imagine they already do).

Nothing important ever happens quickly enough that you can't afford even 20 seconds of delay, and if you do it properly (it being broadcast) you won't even notice (just say it's the 10 oclock news at 9:59:40). This then gives all receivers 20 seconds to gather packets and retries in order to keep the buffer full so that it play seamlessly for you.

Honestly not rocket science, and already in use (which is why people have to turn their radios down if they are phoning in - the safety delay lets you hear 7-second-delayed feedback).

Yes, but there's a model that nobody ever does:

- Purchase the game/video/whatever. You "own" it. It's yours. You don't need to pay again.

- Subscribe with a minimal fee to access the service.

- If you don't pay, you lose access to the service BUT YOU CAN RESTORE IT, even ten years down the line, by paying for it again, and get access to your purchases back.

1) Only users actually using the service need pay.

2) You don't need to keep servers running "in case" someone jumps on quickly. They have to pay first.

3) Users don't lose their purchases, so they're more likely to make them.

4) You can price it so that 1 month of access costs more than just keeping the existing subscription going.

This stops the problems of "I paid once I want to access that movie at any time in perpetuity so keep the servers running" vs "If I stop paying even once, I lose all my stuff".

Re: I can take a stab at it..

3. No real business case, when everything is sitting behind a thumping big NAT / NetScaler.

4. The additional cost of making sure every wheezing business app is IPV6 compliant

Sorry, but if 3 is true, then 4 is a lie.

Because if you're behind NAT, only your gateway need be IPv6-capable. It's providing the service to others (quite literally translating the network addresses!).

So your creaky old business apps don't need to change one iota. At worst, the gateway will still send them out via IPv4.

But if you IPv6 JUST THE GATEWAY, you're golden. Done. No further changes required. IPv6 access now and in the future, and billions of addresses to use internally.

The whole IPv6 / NAT argument has ALWAYS BEEN horsecrud.

Re: DrayTek routers are considered high end in the UK

I admin a prep school.

One of our remote sites runs everything over VPN (so we don't have to pay for more licenses and controllers), including telephony, via a Draytek.

Works marvellously, even if they are little clunky to configure sometimes (e.g. VLANs).

Currently running a bunch of desktops (all servers are on main site), managed switches (all uplink via the Draytek back to main site for all traffic), all the telephones (IP to main site controllers), all the CCTV (all 4K IP cameras back to main site controllers), access control (IP back to main site) and all the ancilliary little bits that go with it.

Ethernet connection over leased line, 4G backup, and (wonderfully) direct SIP access if we needed it and analogue backup for if that goes down too (meaning the Draytek is the critical 999 path for all phones on that site with no less than 4 ways to dial out). We could also use ADSL/VDSL on the same device but that would be slight overkill.

Been using similar model at home for years... literally never had a problem with it. In fact I used my freebie Draytel SIP account to show the main site SIP trunk provider how a real telephony company does things because that "just works" while theirs needed all sorts of forwards and NAT helpers and proxies and junk.

I also used their managed wireless at home and they worked just as well too.

Either they've come on since you last used them, or you chose a spectacularly bad model.

Re: Whois necessity

Given the amount of C/O GoDaddy/Tucows/etc. entries on WHOIS, I imagine that's all they ever do anyway.

I could say I'd Fred Bloggs and register a domain, it doesn't mean I actually am them. But if you needed to establish the legal owner, someone somewhere paid on a credit card, and only the registrars knows what card, and only the banks can link that to an account, and only all of those taken together will tell you who actually is responsible.

Hence WHOIS lost its purpose many years ago, the second they allowed C/O entries, or didn't verify that the domain owners are who they say they are. Which was basically day one.

Try it. It doesn't take long to register a domain and put the registration info as Microsoft (UK) Ltd. or anything else you care to make up. It doesn't mean they're responsible for it.

Re: For those who are unable to figure it out...

That's fine.

Enforce that everyone needs to pay for your art, into perpetuity.

Nobody has any problem with that. It's the situation for almost everything already.

But the single, logical, only possible outcome: All the rights for every piece of art and music in the world end up in the hands of a DeBeers-like conglomerate. Because you'll die. Your heirs will take it on, it'll get sold off to fund someone's gambling debts, and then there will be "The Art Corporation" saying you have to pay £10 to view the Mona Lisa for a fraction of second. No pictures. No postcards. DMCA takedowns on every image and parody of it online.

P.S. This includes all the future artists. They won't be able to hear music, see paintings, admire sculpture, handle artefacts, etc. without paying to do so. And that just destroys the whole point of art to begin with.

Nobody's saying "Hey, you, independent artist releasing their first album, give me and my mates a copy for nothing so we can copy it around the world". We're saying "Hey, that stuff that's LITERALLY ANTIQUE (100 years old), with untraceable lineage, sold on 20 times to people who have absolutely no relation to the artist, or any appreciation of beyond how many T-shirts they can sell with it on, maybe it's time that people were allowed to appreciate that for themselves now and tuck it into the legacy and history of the country, rather than still selling it for 99c on iTunes".

Literally 0.00001% of smaller of all the art that's ever been made survives to the modern day. Preserving it all into perpetuity, though a noble cause, means that all the important stuff gets swamped in the dross of YouTube channels and Spotify mixes.

It's not about not compensating artist for their work (for the record, I compensate all artists whose work I use - I have paid for music that goes into games I make, every pixel of artwork I utilise in them, hell I literally paid for a licence to use my avatar image that I use on every website forum, etc. because I like it and I found the original artist. I pay for every game I play, every book I read, every film I watch. I don't listen to music at all, but I protect music rights where they occur during my workplace - e.g. licensing for public performance of tracks, etc.). It's about not gaining a perpetual right that you can sell off to anyone.

You can't patent a warp drive without, in a relatively short amount of time, anyone being able to take your innovation and copy it. You think that your scrawl on a bit of a paper, your idiocy captured on YouTube, or your written opinion on the Reg forums should have greater protection, into perpetuity? It's just not a reasonable view of the situation.

If you have any appreciation for art of any kind, you'll realise that you can't OWN it. You can lease it for a short while, you can be inspired by it (with appropriate attribution), and you can use it. But you can't ever really own it to the point of control. Even if you created it.

Re: Social media content

Work in a workplace that allows adults to control themselves when at work.

Re: It's no good BT complaining 'WiFi'

That's like most people having treacle driveways to their houses and then complaining that their cars "don't do the 0-60 advertised when they drive off in the morning".

Wifi is a SHARED MEDIUM over UNREGULATED radio frequencies. There's no possible way it can reflect the reality of what they delivering to you down a customer-specific cable via their own certified equipment.

P.S. General rule of thumb I use as an IT Manager... wifi is 20 times slower than a cable. It doesn't matter if you deploy stupendously expensive stuff (we have Cisco Meraki... £600 for a basic AP) or have a clear field (we are a 28 acre sites set in farmland), there is no way for wireless to provide the performance you need the second ANYONE (not even your own devices) walks into range.

There are only THREE possible non-interfering channels on 2.4GHz, for instance, and the channels themselves are unregulated so people can use them for ANYTHING (not just Wifi, video senders and all kinds of crap). Guess what frequency most people have on their router? 2.4GHz.

So before you even start, in a typical residential street, you are dividing the maximum theoretical throughput on your wifi device by about 5-10, in a spiky, unpredictable, unregulated way, to get the speed you might actually achieve with timeslicing, channel-sharing, interferences, etc. If you're lucky. And though you "might get" a speed test that's a high number, it's by no means reflective of real world usage, or what will happen if you click it again.

Then consider that most households have 5-10 devices connected to wifi - everything from phones to computers to consoles to cameras to doorbells to tablets to Chromecasts etc. etc. etc. You don't stand a chance of getting any accuracy at all, and your neighbour waking up their phone next door will drastically affect your speeds.

Wifi is 20 times slower than a cable. Always. Think of that when you tell people to log onto a network over their home wifi into a VPN... literally multiply your normal logon etc. times by 20 before you even start.

Re: ISP email

So you'd rather the people who have your credit card, telephone number and home address run your email, rather than the people who you just signed up to a free account for with no details required.

(P.S. Don't make me prove that you can get a GMail address with no personal info again, I was able to create one in ten seconds last time someone asked, without providing real name, any address at all, nor phone number, backup email or anything identifying beyond - presumably - my IP address).

Generally petrol won't explode entirely in a single few seconds. Though you can get a bang, it has to be aerated and dispersed to make a single fireball.

In general, it will burn fiercely and slowly for several minutes with maybe a bang every now and then. Sure, your car will be totally burnt but generally you have time to get out.

A battery, especially Li-Po etc., can disperse its entire energy and hit runaway temperatures in seconds. There are videos of laptop batteries catching fire and going bang on people's laps - you'd think that would be the kind of thing you could feel coming. And a guy was just killed by a vape thing exploding: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/05/17/1242259

Yes, the energy density of both is high, and petrol is nearly twice as much (I believe), but it's how it burns. You need something catastrophic to set fire to your fuel lines, and even worse to the tank. But you just need a stray bit of metal in the wrong place, or for some kind of contact with the chassis, with a battery.

Plus, lead-acids generally release hydrogen when charging, and lithiums can't contact water, which doesn't help.

P.S. So many people don't follow the right procedure for jump-starting a car... sure, they get away with it an awful lot. One day they won't.

Re: Great Scott

I bet a good percentage is spent on, say, displaying white pixels on computers for Google's home page.

On World Eco day they once went black and estimated the savings worldwide and it was a significant chunk.

Fact is, it's not money wasted if you profit from it personally, and many people who use Bitcoin are profiting from it even if they aren't millionaires or immune to the risk of it tanking overnight.

An alternate shot-in-the-arm is "Bitcoin creates jobs and increases product demands at electricity suppliers". It's not like they aren't PAYING for the electricity. And if people choose to pay for it, it gets taxed and (you would hope) invested into the electricity network. And, of course, they choose to pay because someone, somewhere will give them MORE money than the electricity costs to do it themselves, or they wouldn't bother.

I never get these anti-Bitcoin arguments. If someone was staring at a screen for 8 hours a day catching silly balls when they could be working - yes, we have a problem as a culture. That someone legitimately pays for a product, transforms it, and sells it on... why is that a problem?

If we then say "Oh, well, look, we're short of electricity", then surely it means the electricity company needs to profit as much as it can so they can provide more of it and investigate new ways to make more, and more cheaply.

It's like complaining that bookshops exist. If people weren't buying their product, they wouldn't exist.

Even worse - no contract, little obligation whatsoever after a year of paying for it.

I know you had no choice, as such, but it's not a consumer rights issue to pay for a good that was delivered according to the terms and conditions (which is a contract) just because you "could have" got a better deal if they'd performed better.

It's called X10.

Re: Nothing new here...

Yep.

And I imagine it's not that difficult to "patch" a branch to include a configuration item, and then pull that patch into all the similar configurations to solve problems globally.

Sure, you wouldn't be able to guarantee to blanket-remove every instance of a conflicting config, but you could push 99.9% of the problem out of the way with one commit.

I do still wonder, though, why configuration is random files of plain-text and not database-driven for almost anything. Because then this is literally a transaction you can rollback at any point, and you could do things like:

UPDATE * FROM Apache_sites WHERE SSL = 'enabled' AND SSL_Private_Key.expiry_date < NOW()..... etc.

Re: Most Politicians-:)

Rolls a 1. Critical hit to common decency. Make a saving throw using stupidity factor.

Re: Is it actually viable outside the lab?

"On the rowhammer forums there's practically no comments, and appears not to be a particular problem in the real world. Maybe if you're a nation state guarding something particularly valuable, but for the average user?"

Pretty much this sums up almost all security problems, doesn't it?

I can't remember the last time people were sent to scramble for something. WannaCry hit those people who don't run Windows Update. Nothing really came of BEAST and POODLE, but obviously yes we do need to patch our services and remove the vulnerability, etc. Spectre and Meltdown - sure, they'll generate new ways into the system but they're already being patched out and I'm not sure anything is actually exploiting them on any kind of large scale yet as they're not that easy to exploit and rely on already running arbitrary code on a system.

Pretty much, the average person just needs to do what they've been told to do. Update. Install some kind of defence (this could mean just Windows Firewall and Windows Defender, for instance, but most people know to go the extra mile and get something else). Nobody is saying it'll be guaranteed, but you're kinda done at that point and anything further is not something you could expect the average home user to do or understand.

This is why I don't get the publicity over some of these things. Y2K never affected home users. You could patch it and fix it and workaround it as a techy and nobody would ever have known it was a problem. Since then, every exploit has a big fuss made of it, and pretty much only us techy guys who have to fix the problems / apply the fixes really care, and we get to know about it anyway (all the "brand-name" exploits are really just hype, from what I see, and yet things like the Windows CredSSP exploit against RD and VPN seems much more serious and is only known about by a CVE number).

Do you really think that the answer is ever going to be more than "yes, it's a problem, yes, we're trying to patch against it, no, we can't fix every possible avenue, yes, we'll combat it in the next generation of hardware/software, in the meantime make sure you keep up to date" for any of these problems?

Re: BT Plus

I'm with Three (not my first choice). I don't pay much (£30 a month) but I have a 40Gb allowance.

However:

- I pay month-to-month. It's £25/month if I sign up to an annual contract.

- It doesn't include Netflix and a handful of popular sites (SnapChat, etc.) at all (unlimited usage of those).

- Vodafone have a very similar deal where it's £25 a month, 50Gb, and for £7 extra it doesn't include ANYTHING you've heard of - YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Spotify, Prime Video, etc.).

I imagine the latter is more than sufficient for any household whatsoever - the heavy stuff is video for most people and removing that from the allowance by buying a "multimedia pass" (or whatever it's called) saves you an awful lot of data.

I didn't go with Vodafone as they were too stupid to organise a SIM and then their website won't let me in again because it thinks I already have an account but I can't order another SIM or sort it out except in a store and I can't be bothered. They were my first choice because it's so viable, but Three works just fine.

Of course, you have to buy a Wifi router too and it's not at all difficult to find one that tracks usage on the screen, or limits it to certain people / amounts, etc. I have a little battery-powered Huawei thing (instant power-cut backup!) and it shows usage on the front screen all the time and refuses to let you go over-data (as does the Three account itself, so you don't get nasty shocks).

If/when I do go over, it lets me piggyback off any other Wifi network seamlessly - so all the devices, including laptops with Steam, Chromecast, etc. are all set up to connect to the router, and the router can actually switch and get its data from my phone, a hotspot, my neighbours, etc. with one setting change.

I also get a consistent good speed - small enough latency to game over (I play CS), more than enough to stream a movie in HD, do fast downloads, browse the web etc. and the wifi it offers can connect 10 devices by default and get full 802.11n speeds (e.g. I have a Chromecast that can stream from the laptop, SteamLink, CCTV DVR, etc. and friends join the wireless when they come round).

You have to be a LITTLE careful, but with that Vodafone package I imagine I wouldn't even need to consider use of it at all.

Worst case, I stick my phone in hotspot mode, the router picks up that network and it takes priority, and I can carry on but using the spare data on my phone instead.

I imagine we've subtracted that amount from any and all renegotiated trade deals with Ecuador in the intervening time.

Re: Priority P1 Severity S1 - yep, that's a bug Jim

Again... there just aren't enough people affected to care.

If literally Huawei phones couldn't run Google Maps, or some popular app that uses them (everything from OKCupid dating apps to games use that interface in the background!), then it would flag rather heavily with everyone who buys an Huawei phone.

It doesn't. So it hasn't. Nobody is saying "your problem doesn't exist". We're saying that it's not as prevalent or as affecting as you seem to think. There are 200+ notes on that bug report. I'd expect THOUSANDS, tens of thousands, if it was actually impacting app developers to the extent you suggest.

It's a niche issue that has happened to affect you and your uses. Nobody else (here or other places) even realised it was a problem.

Re: Thanks GRC

That was more about a service running exposed to the Internet by default, back in the days of XP/98 when people used to connect via modems and be their only defence against network-borne packets

Doesn't mean that UPnP isn't an atrocious idea. But GRC was more concerned with "why is there a new, by-default, always-on, Internet exposed service on all Windows PC's" and would let you turn it off via software. Nothing to do with UPnP on routers, networks in general etc.